Your conversion marketing practice is actually a “stack” of disciplines or online marketing strategy components each of which you will have to master or have some level of capability with.
Mastering all of these online marketing strategy components may sound like a tall order, and it is. However, if you are marketing online, you are involved with conversion issues by definition.
The Quintessential Guide to Online Marketing Strategy Components
You may be wondering if marketing automation is really worth the investment. But if you’re a performance-oriented marketer–focused on the science of turning prospects into future customers, always concerned about knowing exactly which of your marketing efforts worked and why – that’s like asking if you’re getting your money’s worth from Microsoft Word; it’s something you just can’t do your job without.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the modern online marketing strategy components – a strategy that cannot be implemented without automation.
To automate something, we must first understand it. Performance marketers are focused on turning their online channels into lead generation engines or revenue streams. They focus on conversion.
“Conversion” is the term given to a series of magical events in the life of a customer,in which a stranger becomes a suspect, a suspect becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a customer.
In online marketing, a marketer focused on converting visitors to prospects or sales must embrace a set of capabilities, each enabled by and depending on its predecessor. These steps create a capability “stack” (see Fig. 1) that is helpful in planning the implementation of the efforts that make conversion marketing possible.
Figure 1: The Conversion Marketing Components
The Online Marketing Strategy Components or Conversion Stack
Today, when one thinks of conversion marketing, one generally thinks of Website Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization. These practices focus on measurement and optimization, and represent the top of the stack of capabilities that online marketers must master to outpace competitors online.
Before a business can begin measuring and optimizing a website or other online marketing strategy, the foundational issues of business goals, visitor profiles, content requirements, and delivery channels must be addressed.
Every business with a Web presence has invested at some level in the conversion stack. However, those companies that embrace these capabilities develop a momentum and velocity in their online strategy that allows them to accelerate past entrenched businesses.
These businesses use the conversion stack to leverage their marketing efforts, changing the math of marketing in their favor. The goal is to grow revenue while reducing real marketing costs.
Marketing automation helps marketers define and carry out each capability in the stack with a precision that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise, and therefore plays a crucial role in an organization committed to performance marketing.
Business Goals: The Base of the Marketing Strategy Components
Knowing exactly what you want your website to do for your business.
The digital space cannot meet all of the goals a business has for growth. However, your business can accomplish things online that are impossible or cost prohibitive through another channel, such as:
Improve the quality of leads, reducing sales costs and increasing close ratios.
Reduce inbound calls for information by moving interactions online.
Eliminate expensive marketing channels.
Reach prospects not found via other media.
Add online services that make your offering more valuable.
Increase cross-sells and up-sells.
Increase average sales price.
Steal market share and mind share from our competitors.
At this stage, we seek to define the integration points of our marketing automation system, and to establish our baselines performance metrics.
Defining Your Marketing Automation Integration Points
While we can measure many things with sophisticated marketing automation tools, it is critical that we focus on those capabilities that are necessary to our business goals, and ignore (or defer) those that are not.
If our business has a long sales cycle involving direct sales efforts, integration with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial; it is how we track our leads through the sales process.
If we are tasked with reducing the sales cycle, we will want a two-way integration between our CRM and our marketing automation system so that we can monitor our success over time. Otherwise, a simple one-way integration may be sufficient.
Likewise, if we seek to increase the average sales price of new customers, we will need to integrate with our financial system to retrieve and measure that goal.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There is a metric that we can use to either define our success for each goal, or approximate it. For example, “reducing sales costs” means that the sales efforts are converting more leads into customers.
However, there is no off-the-shelf metric for “sales cost” reported by our marketing automation systems.
Instead, the close ratio – the number of leads converted divided by leads generated – would be a reasonable proxy for reducing sales costs.
Likewise, the success of cross-sells or up-sells may be measured by the frequency of repeat purchases or by the average lifetime value of existing customers.
There should be a small set of KPIs that define your top-level online business goals. All other metrics help you answer the question of “why.”
Don’t let the metrics drive your curiosity. Let the business goals drive the choice of metrics.
Defining Your Baselines
There are lies, damn lies and analytics, to paraphrase author Mark Twain. Analytics are rarely accurate.
You must instead measure changes in your KPIs. To measure changes, you must first establish baselines for each.
In most industries, a year’s worth of analytics data is necessary to fully account for seasonal changes in the marketplace, but don’t let this stop you. Implement your analytics tools and let them begin collecting data. In the mean time, estimate your KPIs manually, by gathering data wherever you can. Eventually, your analytics will determine your baselines.
The goal is for the current performance of any KPI to exceed its baseline. Proper reporting is done in terms of percentage increase or decrease. If a KPI consistently rests above its baseline, you have established a new baseline to beat in the coming weeks and months.
These baselined KPIs define your “dashboard.”
However, as you will soon find out, dashboards are unsatisfying because they don’t answer the question, “Why is this KPI changing.” We’ll talk about understanding “why” a little later.
Visitor Profiling: Aligning Your Business Goals with Visitor Buying Habits
Let’s review the second of the online marketing strategy components. Understanding the best visitors needs, the reason they are visiting today and the information they need to feel comfortable taking action. Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between the websites and the needs of visitors. Most business sites follow a “brochure” style approach, in which the site talks about the company and its products.
This is not what your visitors want.
They want you to talk about them and their problems.
Touchpoint Personas differ from traditional customer segments in one significant way: We are only interested in what they need at the moment they are interacting with our measurable online communications. This singular focus allows us to zero in on those things that a visitor needs. Touchpoint Personas are the important tool at this stage and you can click on the link to read my article on touchpoint personas and points of resolution.
These become the content that you will use on your website, in your outbound marketing and throughout your channels. As you will see, content allows us to answer the question “why” when our performance changes, for the better or worse.
Content Strategy: We are No Longer Marketers
What content will you create for these important visitors? Will it be articles, video, or audio? These are important considerations made easy from your touchpoint personas.
We are no longer marketers, but publishers. In almost any industry, any market, it is absolutely necessary that we provide information, guidance, education and entertainment to the marketplace. The Internet has turned our prospects into researchers, and we must provide them with the content that answers their questions.
Our personas give us a complete picture of those visitors that will move our business forward. We know why they are visiting and how they like to receive information. Their demographic profile will tell us which technologies they use and this helps us select the proper format for our content. The points of resolution tell us exactly what our content should cover.
At this point, our content strategy should unfold like the board game “Clue.” In the popular board game, we use a process of elimination to understand who committed a murder, which weapon was used, and where the deed was done.
In our game of “persona clue”, we create a list of similar actions. We deduce who we are targeting, which point of resolution we are addressing, and where this information will be delivered.
We might say, “Darla Decider will download ‘Ten Reasons Projects Fail’ as a white paper on our website.” What we have done with this step is change the conversation from, “Which landing pages do we need to develop?” to, “How can we make this important content available to our best prospects?” Content is the coal that will stoke the furnaces of your marketing automation system and one key ingredient of the online marketing strategy components you need to master.
Media and Channels: Mixing Media in the Right Proportions
How do your visitors want to hear from you? Where can your visitors be reached? Your choice of channels may include webinars, email, social media, blog posts and more.
If our content strategy is about giving prospects what they need, our media strategy is about placing content where our prospects can find it.
Touchpoint personas will be immensely helpful in identifying the right mix of channels through which to deliver and advertise content. Demographics will give you some idea of your prospects’ media preferences.
For example, prospects over 55 are still best reached through email.
Media selection is an evolving process, especially in a world in which so many new channels are appearing every year. In a few short years, we’ve moved from Web pages, email, and banner ads, to search marketing, social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, microblogs, and mobile applications.
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.
This is where marketing automation becomes indispensable. It is your publishing and distribution system. It must help you manage a stream of content delivered through a variety of channels and track results along the way. Your investment in publishing automation will also allow you to test multiple versions of your content to see which affects your KPIs most positively.
Your System Should Be Easy to Use
You should be able to intuitively setup a variety of content campaigns and see the results. The days of the “launch and watch” website are over. In most industries changes must now come weekly or daily.
Your System Should Not Be a Silo
Producers will need appropriate access to create and stage new content. It should be easy for members of the team to check content and settings to ensure the campaign will launch successfully.
Your System Should Offer a Variety of Metrics
Each content format and channel will be measured differently. You must be able to track downloads of whitepapers. You must be able to track the conversion rates of email-based content. You must be aware of how often a link is shared on social networks.
Needless to say, you will need some help coordinating all of this activity and measuring the results. And this leads us to the another one of the online marketing strategy components. If you aren’t intimate with your marketing automation tool, you’re not doing performance marketing.
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Measuring and Optimizing
Putting the analytics and processes in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This often means designing your online presence differently to enable tracking of visitor behavior. Testing your assumptions is the only way to achieve the high conversion rates that make you seem invincible to your competitors. This is how you reduce the cost of all online marketing efforts.
At the pinnacle of the online marketing strategy components is optimization.
Optimization involves making changes based on the metrics you’ve captured.
Every communication is a test.
Each time you send a communication, you are testing a set of assumptions – assumptions about what your prospects want and need in their buying process, about the format of the content, and about the places they want to consume it.
Every communication can tell us the “why” of our success or failure.
For each communication, you must devise a strategy to measure the effectiveness of the content. Each communication will have a set of primary KPIs.
An email newsletter may invite readers to purchase a new line of shoes, and to join your Facebook page as well. If the primary goal is to sell shoes, you must be able to measure the conversion rate of the email.
It isn’t sufficient to increase sales of the shoe. You must have a strategy to know how many sales were generated by this email.
Watch the Results
The final step of each communication – the step too often overlooked – is reviewing your results. When the communication has run its course, you simply look at the KPIs to learn the secrets desires of your audience.
Which articles are read most?
Which subject lines convert well?
Which discounts generate sales?
Which tweets draw the most visits?
Your marketing automation system should provide easy drill-down to the metrics that define the success of each effort.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master: Conclusions
You are sitting in the monthly executive meeting. You have created a slide deck with your top-level KPIs as reported by your marketing automation system. They are a summary of how your individual efforts have affected the bottom line.
When the questions come, you know the “why” and the “what’s next” for your marketing efforts. “Why did our conversion rates go down, but our revenue go up?” the VP of Sales asks.
You know the answer. You tick off the four or five programs that delivered solid results, and then list those that drew unqualified traffic to the site, stating that they will be modified or discontinued.
You’re a performance marketer.
The Business that Knows Grows
Each item of content you produce will have different versions, be available through multiple channels, and will be measured differently. Today’s online businesses won’t function without a useful marketing automation system, a tool that be used by many members of the team.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components aren’t linear, and businesses can expand their capabilities in any of these areas.
However, those businesses that dominate in their industry through online marketing will be proficient in all of the capabilities presented here.
To develop touchpoint personas, read “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis.
For designing measurable social media campaigns, read “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Dave Evans
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Don’t Worry
The good news is that the folks at SiteTuners.com, lead by the always brilliant Tim Ash have put together the Conversion Conference.
The attendees will be leading the online charge in each of their industries.
I can think of no better way to get up the many learning curves that your conversion practice needs than this two day conference.
Topics at Conversion Conference include:
Using Headlines, Copy and Graphic Design to Lift Conversion
You’ve likely read books written by some of the Conversion Conference Speakers, like Landing Page Optimization and Web Design for ROI. There’s no question that the speakers at this conference are the folks you want to be learning from. Check it out. You can even save $250 if you use promo code CCE650 when you register on the Conversion Conference website.
If you won’t be there, I pray that your competitors won’t be either.
To my digital natives and online tribesman everywhere:
What would you tell the printing industry if you had one hour with them?
Think about it: The Printing Industry has been communicating with the world for centuries. While you could argue that they seem slow in adopting digital channels, I would argue that we’ve completely blocked print from our consciousness.
There is an ocean between our peoples.
I have an hour with the Printing Industries of America when I keynote their Converge Conference 2010. Attendees are the boldest of their members, the ones who are looking closely at cross-media business strategies.
What would you tell the owner of a printing company?
How do you admire them?
What do you see that they could be doing better?
Ultimately, I want to understand where the missed opportunities are. When we cross that ocean, what magical happens?
Colonizing the Digital New World
Here’s the setup I’m using for our printing-side brethren:
Welcome to the Digital New World! I am an ambassador for the people of this land. You have traveled far, across the mighty Sea of Apathy to arrive in this place. You have proven yourself as brave explorers. I am here to welcome you and show you around.
We have studied your strange ways and have seen the devices you have that display content without batteries or plugs. I’m sure we seem strange to you as well. Our customs are very different, but we have the same goals: understanding and prosperity.
During your visit, we will examine the differences between us, but more importantly, we will find new opportunities to work together; to combine your “old world” wisdom with our “new world” technology and to build great businesses.
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Developing a social media measurement plan could be a bit boring. But we think it’s OK to take a scientific approach to social media. Here’s why it’s OK to be the Rainman.
In my last Conversion Science column I introduced you to the social media landing page. This landing page has the power to bring social media conversations to a measurable, business-building conversion. Let me show you how to develop the perfect social media measurement plan.
Social media is very important to us at Conversion Sciences. We know that education is the key to changing the web into a place where people find what they are looking for and reward companies for being so darn helpful.
Social media is a great way for us to share our educational and (hopefully) helpful stories, posts, columns and presentations. But to know how our efforts are performing, we need to create a social media measurement plan.
Why It’s OK to be the Rainman of Social Media
However, we aren’t really that good at social media conversations. It may come as no surprise that, as scientists, we are like the Rainman of social media. Like Raymond from the move, we are capable of amazing feats of insight and intelligence, but we often miss important social cues, especially when interactions occur 140 characters at a time.
“I’m an excellent Tweeter”
“I’m an excellent dancer.”
Given the fact that people like us sometimes have awkward digital interactions, you may not invite us to your swanky party. However, you certainly want us to participate in your social graph.
People like us provide an important service to the social spheres. Our content-oriented social media strategy feeds those who rely on social media for education and elucidation.
If you spend the bulk of your social time interacting with individuals, you are probably using a conversation-oriented social media strategy.
Choose the right social strategy
A conversion is more than just a conversation without the T&A.
In our studies, we have observed two broad categories of social media behavior:
Conversation-oriented social behavior
Content-oriented social behavior
While the posts, pictures and pokes that make up an online conversation certainly qualify as “content,” we distinguish conversational content from content that is specifically designed to educate, entertain or inform on a particular subject area.
This article is “content.” The comments you will inevitably leave are “conversation.”
We have found that content-oriented social strategies lead to more measurable campaigns. Plus, many conversion scientists don’t have the social skills to implement a conversation-oriented strategy.
Conversation-oriented social media
This strategy centers around conversations. It typically involves one or more personalities that interact with individuals in the social graph. This strategy is ideal for improving customer support, building awareness, personal branding and image marketing.
Conversations may involve content, but it is the interactions that are front-and-center in this strategy.
Results are typically measured using predictive metrics, such as friends, followers, likes, bookmarks, retweets and reach. These soft metrics are often more satisfying to us than definitive metrics such as leads, sales, and conversion rate.
I admire people like Kate Buck Jr. who make this strategy really work for their business and their clients.
Content-oriented social media
Unlike conversation-oriented strategies, this approach focuses on content as we’ve defined it here: communication that is designed to educate, entertain or inform. This strategy is ideal for lead generation, thought-leadership and building targeted social channels.
Content-oriented conversations don’t focus on the authoring brand or individual. Instead, these conversations circle around the content itself. This content will spur conversations, and ideally will be passed around, expanding our reach.
Of greatest interest to conversion scientists is that content draws visitors to social landing pages, where conversion beacons can drive business-building conversions.
Develop the Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan
It’s possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here’s how.
Step 1: Create some content.
The catch with the content-oriented strategy is that you must create content. Frequency is up to you. In a sixty-plus day experiment conducted here in the labs, five articles and seven blog posts drove 145 status updates, tweets, emails, Flickr images, etc.
We focused on articles that I write at The Conversion Scientist blog, that I contribute here at Search Engine Land and that I contribute at other venues such as ClickZ and the Content Marketing Institute.
Step 2: Devise a way to measure results.
To measure results, traffic must arrive on one of our instrumented pages. However, some of the content we used lived on other sites.
Our strategy was to create a social media landing page for each of our “off-world” articles in the form of a blog post. These posts teased the article and linked to it.
While we announce each new article through our social networks, the bulk of our marketing drove friends and followers to the blog post.
Right now, Google Analytics is our favorite single point of collection because of its content filtering and segmented reports.
For click tracking, Bit.ly still can’t be beat for its flexibility and integration with so many tools.
Step 3: Market each content item as if each was its own product.
Each of these content items gets a multi-network, multi-touch treatment designed to expose the maximum number of our friends and followers to this content. We maintain small but targeted social graphs on Facebook (<1000), Twitter (<2000) and LinkedIn (>1000).
On Facebook we did a single status post to my profile as well as “The Conversion Scientist” and “Web Strategies for Business” pages.
On Twitter each content item got between two and four tweets. We tried simply repeating the tweets as well as composing a series of unique tweets.
We did one LinkedIn status update, but did not post discussions on LinkedIn groups because the process couldn’t be automated. We’re looking for tools to help with this.
Several items got supporting posts on our predecessor site, the Customer Chaos blog.
All of this may sound like a lot of work. That is why we need tools to automate the process. Right now, Austin-based Spredfast seems to have the best support of the social networks we use, as well as one great collection point for analytics from across our social graph. Hootsuite is an alternative for those focusing on Twitter.
Note: We turned off all of our cross-network services, such as Ping.fm to implement this strategy.
Step 4: Attach a wireless tracking device.
This is real Hollywood stuff.
The most important feature of our measurement strategy is a wireless tracking device that we attached to each post, tweet, email and image. This is the secret sauce that enables the report shown above.
The URL builder provided by Google is quite unsatisfying for us, so we’ve developed a special Google Analytics link tagging spreadsheet that you can use to create and track your micro-coded addresses.
Next time, I’ll show you the queries and reports that reveal which content, social networks and conversations generate the most email subscriptions for us.
In the mean time, let me know the social media distribution and tracking tools that you use and love in the comments section below.
Article originally published on my Search Engine Land column “The Perfect Social Media Measurement Strategy.”
Brian Massey
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When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set a series of events in motion that results in our visitors feeling… dumb. Don’t let your content break promises to your readers.
These four ways set a series of events in motion that result in our visitors feeling… dumb. Make sure to keep your content promises to increase conversions.
Treat your content as a product
“Have you seen my sunglasses?’’ I yelled out to my wife as I was heading out the door.
“In our room on the night stand,” she yelled back.
Little did she know that she was setting in motion a series of events destined to ruin a fine Saturday.
You see, she unwittingly set an expectation in my mind, an expectation that my sunglasses would be there on the night stand beside the lamp and the book I read before bed.
But when I got to the bedroom, they weren’t there.
The series of events that unfolded next are classic human reactions, reactions that you may be creating in the way you present your content.
I entered stage one: I got angry. Not “throwing things” angry, but “disappointed because I just want to get out and do some errands but I’m attached to wearing my sunglasses when I’m out” angry.
Stage two: I got self conscious, so I looked all around the nightstand. Nothing.
Stage three: I got self righteous. I climbed down the stairs down to my wife, building my self-righteousness with every step.
“They’re not there,” I said, my voice dripping with thinly-masked disdain.
She looked at me with a face and stance that would have made our teenager proud.
“Did you look on my nightstand, too?”
Stage four: I questioned my very ability to function in the world. I slinked back up the stairs, retrieved the sunglasses and snuck out the door.
It was no fault of hers that I assumed the sunglasses would be on my night stand, but website visitors are coming with expectations.
When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set the exact same series of events in motion. This isn’t good for our business.
Keep Your Content Promises: What is the Psychological Price for Your Content
When you invite someone to read your content, you are making a promise. Your promise is that you will help them solve a problem or entertain them.
Our invitations, be they found in an email, a status update or a blog post must promise something or there would be no clicks.
Visitors may be finding and consuming our content just fine, but we can extract a severe price by making things unintuitive. Just because someone finds your content, doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.
Here are some of the innocent things we do to make our visitors feel frustrated.
1. The Drill Down
If your content link is sending your visitors to your home page or to a “resources” page, you’re setting them up for stage one anger.
Most people expect a click to take them to the very place that content exists. Don’t let them down.
Sure, you may have a logical navigation strategy.
“All they have to do is click on the White Papers menu item then select Case Studies, then pick the one they want,” you might say.
Visitors are saying, “All you had to do was put a link to it on the page you sent me to.”
My wife assumed I would look on both night stands. I assumed she’d have specified the “other” one if that was where it was.
2. The Scroll
For many many visitors, if the content headline isn’t above the “fold” on your page, then it doesn’t exist. Period.
What would push the headline down? Usually, it’s a BAH (big-ass header). The BAH is usually some large stock photo plastered across the top of the page. This is a common feature of websites and is found on both home pages and interior pages.
Bosses love this kind of thing, but it foils visitors.
Your headline and first paragraph should start as close to the top of the page as is politically possible.
3. The Unending Preview
Too often, one BAH isn’t enough, so designers have invented the “flash scroller” also called a “rotator box.” If you are employing one of these to present content choices, you are WAY over-estimating the patience of even the most interested visitor.
Don’t make us sit through a series of cross-fading options.
An image fades in, then we wait.
Another image fades in, then we wait.
Another fade, then we wait.
We won’t last long. I probably lost dozens of readers just writing those three sentences.
4. The Wall of Questions
One of the best ways to generate leads is to promise great content in exchange for contact information. However, you must look at this as a purchase, not a gratuitous grab for their email address. Don’t present them with a wall of form fields and ask them to fill out the form.
A headline that is as identical to the promise of the ad or link as possible.
A picture of the product. Even an eBook can be formatted to look like a publication, and visitors get it.
Tell them very specifically what they will get when they complete the form. Don’t be afraid to lay some text on the page.
Your form should only ask for information you absolutely need. Your content may not be “worth” their phone number and address in their eyes.NOTE: If you must ask for qualifying information, explain how it will be used and why it is needed.
The text on the button should tell the visitor what is next. “Get Your Report” or “Subscribe” is much more clickable than “Submit”, especially if we aren’t sure to what we’re submitting ourselves.
This is what is expected when someone clicks on an invitation to read or view content.
Deviate from this basic formula only if you must. Otherwise, visitors may leave your site questioning their very ability to function in a digital world.
Brian Massey
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Why do so many marketing departments have trouble turning personas into actionable marketing gold? I believe it is because traditional “buyer personas” are too broad in their definition.
In this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.
Personas are fictional representations of your customers designed to help you understand what to say to prospects and how to deliver content to them.
There is no better predictor of conversion success than the availability of personas.
“Your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt.”
The Anatomy of a Great Online Persona
Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer service support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online.
None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content.
Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver.
Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include to help you understand the customer.
Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions.
How is a touchpoint persona different from a buyer persona?
Those businesses with the most effective content marketing strategies are using buyer personas as their guide. But, buyer personas have the following limitations when it comes to creating a customer journey and its implementation:
They may not be found in every channel. A buyer persona that visits your brick and mortar store may never buy online.
They often do not comprehend the limits and strengths of individual channels. In the store, the salesperson is the primary way customers interact with your brand. Online, there are far more communication options.
The demographics associated with each are open to interpretation. What kind of home does a person making $175,000 a year live in? Some may say a mansion. Some may say a small ranch.
Touchpoint personas focus the team on one channel: the store, the website, the phone, the social graph, etc. The result is fewer personas per channel and more specific personas, which means a more consistent effort on the part of your production teams.
Creating online touchpoint personas: the 7 Components
Here are the components of the touchpoint personas that Conversion Sciences creates for clients. Much of this has been adopted from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
1Demographics
Demographics play only a small part in the touchpoint persona. Age and gender give us an idea of their technical savvy and possible communication styles. Business role will be important for B2B and some B2C sales.
Don’t muddy the water with demographics that don’t apply. For example, marital status may not be helpful in a B2B sale. If not, don’t include it.
2Customer Commentary
The customer commentary answers the question, “Why are they coming to this site at this time in their lives?”
Unlike buyer personas, the customer commentary is written in the voice of the persona. This helps the marketing team empathize with the people visiting your site. It provides the proper vocabulary for writing and keyword research. Answer this question, and you will know exactly how to create content and ad copy for them.
3Mode of Persuasion
The customer commentary will tell you much about the way a certain kind of visitor is going to make a decision, from which you can identify their mode of persuasion.
Will they decide to take action quickly or slowly? Will they seek to decide emotionally or logically? The Eisenbergs outline four primary modes of persuasion to guide your designers and writers: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist and Spontaneous.
4Funnel Points or Customer Touchpoints
What is bringing the persona to this touchpoint, and where are they arriving?
Did a referral drive them to type in your domain?
Did an online search bring them to your home page?
Did a banner ad or email bring them to a landing page?
List these scenarios here, and strive to get visitors close to their points of resolution as directly as possible. Don’t limit these touch points or funnel points to those currently in your marketing mix, but consider new outreach methods based on how these types of customers will find you.
5Points of Resolution
What are the important pieces of information this kind of visitor needs to feel comfortable and confident in taking action? This is your content guide, from which your editorial calendar will rise. Points of resolution may be as simple as “price and delivery” or as complex as “a full understanding of our manufacturing process.”
6Conversion Beacons and Conversion Points
The conversion beacon calls a visitor to action. A conversion point tells you that a visitor has taken action. In the online world, a big red button may serve as a conversion beacon, and a confirmation page may be the conversion point that tells you that a visitor has completed a form.
These map the visitors’ buying processes to the businesses’ selling processes. They also tell you which key performance indicators will gauge the success of your changes.
7Priority
Touchpoint personas are quite thorough and will generate more ideas than can be reasonably implemented, but one conversion beacon or one content item may have a significant impact on leads and sales.
The Eisenbergs recommend listing out the actions generated from these personas. Estimate the minimum time, positive impact and smallest effort for each of them on a scale from one to five. Add these three values together and start working on those with the highest total.
Keep your customer personas out of the drawer
Your touchpoint personas should influence your decisions, and they should evolve as you learn what is working and what is not. Don’t put them in a drawer when you’re done. Print them out and put them in your conference room or break room.
Consider placing them on a collaborative system so that the organization can change them organically.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is easy to create personas and customer journey maps, but it is more difficult to breathe life into them.
To thoroughly explore the power of touchpoint personas, I strongly recommend the book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg. For more on touchpoints please read Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Evans.
Do you use touchpoint personas or something similar? If so, are there additional things that you include?
My ten-year-old son gave me a valuable lesson in content marketing today.
Sean has a good friend who, to hear him tell it, rarely changes his expression. It’s just who he is.
However, Sean was sharing one of this friend’s more interesting ideas: to build a tall building and put a catapult at the top of it to deliver packages around town.
“Was he serious?” we asked.
“Yes,” said Sean. “He had his explaining face on.”
Clearly, when this boy puts on his ‘explaining face,’ you had better listen.
Sean gives words to an attitude that offers all of us a way to make our content more helpful, more interesting and more engaging.
We just need to put on our explaining face.
Your Selling Face or Your Explaining Face
I’ve got my explaining face on right now. It is different from my selling face.
When I have my explaining face on, my eyes are wider, my eyebrows go up, my jaw is drawn back to help me enunciate.
When I have my selling face on, my eyebrows come down and my forehead furrows. My jaw jets forward. I’m in your face.
How does your content change when you have your explaining face on? Mine does.
A Face for Every Occasion
There is a place for each of your faces.
You should use your explaining face when you are participating in what I call an Attention-managed Zone. As I write in my most recent ClickZ column, an attention-managed zone is a place where we have curated the participants or content.
Our Facebook page is an attention-managed zone. Our inbox and our feed reader are as well.
When you are communicating within one of these attention-managed zones, put on your explaining face.
However, when you have drawn someone to your site, to a landing page for instance, you will want to put on your selling face and be more persuasive. Visitors expect to learn about your offering in these places where they have no control over what they will see.
Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society
Attention management is not something that people think about, but it is what we do when we curate places like our inbox, social news streams, and RSS feed readers.
As marketers and advertisers, we are bombarded with statistics that tell us there is a shockingly small supply of time in the world.
“You only have eight seconds to catch a Web visitor’s attention.”
“The average person is bombarded with over 5,000 commercial messages a day.”
“Today’s multitasking Millennials are doing up to 10 things simultaneously.”
“You have to do something surprising every 10 minutes during your presentation to keep the audience awake.”
I would provide citations for these statistics, but “Article writers only have an average of 15 minutes for research, down from 30 minutes in 2007.” I made that last one up.
We believe we’re dealing with the scarcity of our prospects’ time, and are acting accordingly. Too often, we’re getting “all caps” on our audience, shouting louder, shouting more often, and shouting through more channels. I call that tossing “Jenny” around.
What if we worked the other end of the equation? What if we helped our prospects manage their time better? Could we get nine seconds instead of eight? Could we cut our Millennials down to five simultaneous activities?
Unfortunately, attempts at time management have been thwarted in large part by the social part of our brains, the part that says we need to be laced into the lives of others like tangled doilies.
“96 percent of Millennials have joined a social network.”
“Social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the Web.”
While you read this, “100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.”
I can cite these quotes because they come from a “Socialnomics” video that is only four and a half minutes long.
The net of this is that we are spending more time on our digital social pursuits and less time on our commercial messages, such as those found in display advertising.
The Components of an Attention-Managed Zone
An attention-managed zone provides a cone of safety, like a playpen for our children. We check Facebook several times per day because it’s an attention-safe zone. The same is true of e-mail.
When my attention is focused on one of these safe places, I know that:
It will be filled with offerings from people I have vetted at some level.
I can use my time there to refine it, dropping and adding friends, groups, games, etc.
It’s designed for a variety of moods. I can expect to find the informative as well as the entertaining.
I can go there to relieve stress any time of the day or night.
I can participate, helping others manage their attention.
Be Where Attention Falls
My good friend and client Maura Thomas, who is writing the book “Control Your Attention, Control Your Life,” has introduced me to a different way of looking at the time/attention equation that may benefit advertisers.
It seems that we are willing to “kill” time on social networks because it helps us manage our attention.
More and more, we rely on our social graph to keep us in the loop, often 140 characters at a time. Thomas puts this into the category of “attention management.”
The tools we choose and the people we follow make up our attention management strategy. Those places where we implement such strategies – Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon – are “attention-managed zones.”
“Attention wastelands” are those places in which we receive irrelevant information; places that are populated by people and brands that we don’t trust. Prospects must shun these wastelands lest their attention be squandered by fools.
Let me put on my selling face to help persuade you of its value.
Your selling face delivers what your business needs to grow and thrive. If you are afraid to promote your products your online marketing strategies will most likely fail.
Your selling face is a powerful, and you should put it on if you want:
More persuasive copy
Calls to action that deliver leads and sales
A clear focus on reader benefits and less focus on you
If you want captivating headings and pages that turn visitors into readers and then buyers, then put on your selling face today.
Act now and receive a Thinking Face at no additional charge.
Signs that You’re Wearing Your Explaining Face
If you’re new to face management, here are a few signals that you have your explaining face on:
You find yourself telling stories in your writing
You prefer simpler ways to convey a point
You look for more interesting and colorful words
The writing is fun
You feel that you’re helping someone when you click “publish.”
Ironically, these are also the markers of good sales copy, when you should have your selling face on.
Nonetheless, I recommend that you mentally put on your explaining face when you want to write for social media, for your blog or anywhere else that your reader has control.
Your explaining face content will give them reason to stay tuned in.
New Tool Makes it Easy to Find Prospects on Social Networks via Social Appending.
In my most recent ClickZ column, I reflect back on my days as a marketing cog in the corporate machine, a time in which the practice of “appending” was considered “black hat.”
Appending is the practice of adding contact information to records in your prospect database. If you have someone’s name and company, you could “append” their email address and mailing address through a number of services that keep that kind of information.
Companies that sell mailing lists often provide this kind of service.
The thinking was that the prospect hadn’t given you permission to contact them through these other channels, and that it violated the “submit button contract” that is implied when they completed an online form.
Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come. Source: Unbounce.
We’ve come a long way
Oli Gardner has an interesting infographic on the Unbounce blog. The graphic highlights a tool called FlowTown. This is a social media appending tool. Marketers can use it to find the social media accounts of their prospect list, and begin marketing to them through those social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.
This is where those of us who have been around the block groan, and then secretly cheer.
Social Media Appending: Why this is different
While appending has not been considered a best practice, it happens. In fact, the best way to do this is to send ask your prospects for permission after appending the data; sending them an email asking if they want email messages, for example.
Many social media platforms allow us to easily “unfriend” or block unsavory marketers. This puts the opt-out capability in our hands. So asking for permission ahead of time is less of a problem.
But there is a right way to inject yourself into someone else’s conversations. It’s called a Content-oriented Social Media Strategy.
Only “append” people who have expressed an interest in your industry or products. This is how you know your content will be relevant.
Begin with non-promotional content. “How-to” and “10 Ways” style articles test well.
Use social landing pages, such as a blog or Facebook page to “keep it social”
Measure what you send. Stop sending content that doesn’t generate clicks, shares or comments.
If you’re going to jump into the social conversations, do it right, or it will backfire in a very public, viral way.
It is rare that my visual live blogs are less visual than the original presentation, but Dan Zarrella’s presentation on Twitter and Facebook optimization is SO choc full of graphs, that I could barely keep up.
So I resorted to banal prose in my notes.
As a fellow scientist (Dan is the Social Media Scientist), I am happy to borrow from his work in doing my own. Here are my notes from Dan’ presentation at PubCon Masters Group Training. I was glad to share the stage with him.
Dan Zarrella Twitter and Facebook Optimization Notes.
Getting More Followers
“The best way to get followers is to follow people.”
To get more followers:
Finish your profile.
Put a link to your website.
Upload a picture.
Twitter
The twenty most retweeted words:
please retweet
follow
top
social media
help
you
blog post
new blog post
retweet
free
twitter
how to
Twitter Stats
Over 50% of retweets have links.
Retweets tend to have larger words. You don’t have to dumb things down.
Retweets use “novel” or less-used words.
Retweets are noun-heavy, third person.
Retweets have more punctuation, even exclamation marks.
Retweets are less emotional, more conceptual.
Social behavior is retweeted.
Men retweet opinion, women retweet entertainment.
Retweets happen later in the day, after 4:00pm ET.
Women follow more people and tweet more.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
New technology renders emails invisible. Customer Chaos Labs suspected.
Everyone who seeks to do good in the world will inevitably be challenged by an arch-nemesis; someone who’s view of the world is diametrically opposed to yours.
At Conversion Sciences we have Customer Chaos Labs, whose motto is:
If we’re not working for you, we’re working against you.
They are an organization who seeks to lift their clients’ online Web success by simply bringing everyone else down. We see them as basically evil.
This week, one of our clients became the victim of a new Customer Chaos technology: an email invisibility ray.
The results are devastating.
Don’t fall victim to invisible emails.
Proof of the Invisibility Ray’s Existence
The folks at J’Tote Bags crafted a beautiful email, with professional photography, strong reasons to buy, and clear calls to action.
Then, J’Tote sent the email to eager prospects and customers. Somewhere in transit, many of these emails entered the range of the invisibility ray.
The invisibility technology rendered the email almost completely invisible to the human eye. Clearly, an invisible email is going to be read less, depressing open rates and clicks.
Conversion Sciences Defense Technology
Conversion Sciences has worked with the major email clients to develop a “de-cloaking” technology. For example, recipients can restore the email by clicking “Display Images below” in Gmail, or “Click here to download pictures” in Outlook.
Most email clients have implemented something similar.
The problem is that many recipients of your emails may not find a good reason to click on the de-cloaking links if they can’t see the email.
Clearly, this is not an ideal solution.
Defending Yourself Against the Invisibility Ray
A detailed analysis by Conversion Sciences has exposed some weaknesses in the invisibility ray.
It only works on images
Apparently, the invisibility ray doesn’t affect text, but only images. Thus a proper defense against this kind of attack is to use images more sparingly in your email and place text strategically around the email.
This will allow readers to understand the point of the email if the images have been inviso-rayed.
Image “Alt” Text is Sometimes Impervious
If you look closely at Exhibit B, you will see some text appearing in places where the images would have appeared. This is the images’ “alt” text and is created using the “alt” parameters in the HTML <img> tag.
Here’s an example:
<img src=”picture.jpg” alt=”Text that describes the image” />
Use the “alt” text to tell the reader what they will see if they click “Display images below” and invoke the de-cloaking technology.
This does not work in all email clients. Microsoft Outlook won’t show these cues, for example.
However, some email clients will actually allow you to format your “alt” text, making it different sizes and colors.
Conversion Alert: Don’t Fall Victim to Invisible Emails
Email remains one of the most effective online marketing tools available. No wonder the foes of good marketing have targeted it for disruption.
Let a Conversion Scientist review your email strategy. This will ensure that
You are using best practices to maximize deliverability, open rates, clicks and conversions.
You are sending content that is relevant and interesting. This gives you permission to continue sending email to desirable prospects.
You are sending with the right frequency. Sending too often or too rarely can render an email strategy impotent.
You are defended against the invisibility ray and other weapons of chaos. Enough said on this one.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Conversion OptimizationMastering all of these online marketing strategy components may sound like a tall order, and it is. However, if you are marketing online, you are involved with conversion issues by definition.
The Quintessential Guide to Online Marketing Strategy Components
You may be wondering if marketing automation is really worth the investment. But if you’re a performance-oriented marketer–focused on the science of turning prospects into future customers, always concerned about knowing exactly which of your marketing efforts worked and why – that’s like asking if you’re getting your money’s worth from Microsoft Word; it’s something you just can’t do your job without.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the modern online marketing strategy components – a strategy that cannot be implemented without automation.
To automate something, we must first understand it. Performance marketers are focused on turning their online channels into lead generation engines or revenue streams. They focus on conversion.
“Conversion” is the term given to a series of magical events in the life of a customer,in which a stranger becomes a suspect, a suspect becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a customer.
In online marketing, a marketer focused on converting visitors to prospects or sales must embrace a set of capabilities, each enabled by and depending on its predecessor. These steps create a capability “stack” (see Fig. 1) that is helpful in planning the implementation of the efforts that make conversion marketing possible.
Figure 1: The Conversion Marketing Components
The Online Marketing Strategy Components or Conversion Stack
Today, when one thinks of conversion marketing, one generally thinks of Website Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization. These practices focus on measurement and optimization, and represent the top of the stack of capabilities that online marketers must master to outpace competitors online.
Before a business can begin measuring and optimizing a website or other online marketing strategy, the foundational issues of business goals, visitor profiles, content requirements, and delivery channels must be addressed.
Every business with a Web presence has invested at some level in the conversion stack. However, those companies that embrace these capabilities develop a momentum and velocity in their online strategy that allows them to accelerate past entrenched businesses.
These businesses use the conversion stack to leverage their marketing efforts, changing the math of marketing in their favor. The goal is to grow revenue while reducing real marketing costs.
Marketing automation helps marketers define and carry out each capability in the stack with a precision that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise, and therefore plays a crucial role in an organization committed to performance marketing.
Business Goals: The Base of the Marketing Strategy Components
Knowing exactly what you want your website to do for your business.
The digital space cannot meet all of the goals a business has for growth. However, your business can accomplish things online that are impossible or cost prohibitive through another channel, such as:
At this stage, we seek to define the integration points of our marketing automation system, and to establish our baselines performance metrics.
Defining Your Marketing Automation Integration Points
While we can measure many things with sophisticated marketing automation tools, it is critical that we focus on those capabilities that are necessary to our business goals, and ignore (or defer) those that are not.
If our business has a long sales cycle involving direct sales efforts, integration with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial; it is how we track our leads through the sales process.
If we are tasked with reducing the sales cycle, we will want a two-way integration between our CRM and our marketing automation system so that we can monitor our success over time. Otherwise, a simple one-way integration may be sufficient.
Likewise, if we seek to increase the average sales price of new customers, we will need to integrate with our financial system to retrieve and measure that goal.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There is a metric that we can use to either define our success for each goal, or approximate it. For example, “reducing sales costs” means that the sales efforts are converting more leads into customers.
However, there is no off-the-shelf metric for “sales cost” reported by our marketing automation systems.
Instead, the close ratio – the number of leads converted divided by leads generated – would be a reasonable proxy for reducing sales costs.
Likewise, the success of cross-sells or up-sells may be measured by the frequency of repeat purchases or by the average lifetime value of existing customers.
There should be a small set of KPIs that define your top-level online business goals. All other metrics help you answer the question of “why.”
Don’t let the metrics drive your curiosity. Let the business goals drive the choice of metrics.
Defining Your Baselines
There are lies, damn lies and analytics, to paraphrase author Mark Twain. Analytics are rarely accurate.
You must instead measure changes in your KPIs. To measure changes, you must first establish baselines for each.
In most industries, a year’s worth of analytics data is necessary to fully account for seasonal changes in the marketplace, but don’t let this stop you. Implement your analytics tools and let them begin collecting data. In the mean time, estimate your KPIs manually, by gathering data wherever you can. Eventually, your analytics will determine your baselines.
The goal is for the current performance of any KPI to exceed its baseline. Proper reporting is done in terms of percentage increase or decrease. If a KPI consistently rests above its baseline, you have established a new baseline to beat in the coming weeks and months.
These baselined KPIs define your “dashboard.”
However, as you will soon find out, dashboards are unsatisfying because they don’t answer the question, “Why is this KPI changing.” We’ll talk about understanding “why” a little later.
Visitor Profiling: Aligning Your Business Goals with Visitor Buying Habits
Let’s review the second of the online marketing strategy components. Understanding the best visitors needs, the reason they are visiting today and the information they need to feel comfortable taking action. Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between the websites and the needs of visitors. Most business sites follow a “brochure” style approach, in which the site talks about the company and its products.
This is not what your visitors want.
They want you to talk about them and their problems.
Touchpoint Personas differ from traditional customer segments in one significant way: We are only interested in what they need at the moment they are interacting with our measurable online communications. This singular focus allows us to zero in on those things that a visitor needs. Touchpoint Personas are the important tool at this stage and you can click on the link to read my article on touchpoint personas and points of resolution.
These become the content that you will use on your website, in your outbound marketing and throughout your channels. As you will see, content allows us to answer the question “why” when our performance changes, for the better or worse.
Content Strategy: We are No Longer Marketers
We are no longer marketers, but publishers. In almost any industry, any market, it is absolutely necessary that we provide information, guidance, education and entertainment to the marketplace. The Internet has turned our prospects into researchers, and we must provide them with the content that answers their questions.
Our personas give us a complete picture of those visitors that will move our business forward. We know why they are visiting and how they like to receive information. Their demographic profile will tell us which technologies they use and this helps us select the proper format for our content. The points of resolution tell us exactly what our content should cover.
At this point, our content strategy should unfold like the board game “Clue.” In the popular board game, we use a process of elimination to understand who committed a murder, which weapon was used, and where the deed was done.
In our game of “persona clue”, we create a list of similar actions. We deduce who we are targeting, which point of resolution we are addressing, and where this information will be delivered.
We might say, “Darla Decider will download ‘Ten Reasons Projects Fail’ as a white paper on our website.” What we have done with this step is change the conversation from, “Which landing pages do we need to develop?” to, “How can we make this important content available to our best prospects?” Content is the coal that will stoke the furnaces of your marketing automation system and one key ingredient of the online marketing strategy components you need to master.
Media and Channels: Mixing Media in the Right Proportions
If our content strategy is about giving prospects what they need, our media strategy is about placing content where our prospects can find it.
Touchpoint personas will be immensely helpful in identifying the right mix of channels through which to deliver and advertise content. Demographics will give you some idea of your prospects’ media preferences.
For example, prospects over 55 are still best reached through email.
Media selection is an evolving process, especially in a world in which so many new channels are appearing every year. In a few short years, we’ve moved from Web pages, email, and banner ads, to search marketing, social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, microblogs, and mobile applications.
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.
This is where marketing automation becomes indispensable. It is your publishing and distribution system. It must help you manage a stream of content delivered through a variety of channels and track results along the way. Your investment in publishing automation will also allow you to test multiple versions of your content to see which affects your KPIs most positively.
Your System Should Be Easy to Use
You should be able to intuitively setup a variety of content campaigns and see the results. The days of the “launch and watch” website are over. In most industries changes must now come weekly or daily.
Your System Should Not Be a Silo
Producers will need appropriate access to create and stage new content. It should be easy for members of the team to check content and settings to ensure the campaign will launch successfully.
Your System Should Offer a Variety of Metrics
Each content format and channel will be measured differently. You must be able to track downloads of whitepapers. You must be able to track the conversion rates of email-based content. You must be aware of how often a link is shared on social networks.
Needless to say, you will need some help coordinating all of this activity and measuring the results. And this leads us to the another one of the online marketing strategy components. If you aren’t intimate with your marketing automation tool, you’re not doing performance marketing.
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Measuring and Optimizing
Putting the analytics and processes in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This often means designing your online presence differently to enable tracking of visitor behavior. Testing your assumptions is the only way to achieve the high conversion rates that make you seem invincible to your competitors. This is how you reduce the cost of all online marketing efforts.
At the pinnacle of the online marketing strategy components is optimization.
Optimization involves making changes based on the metrics you’ve captured.
Every communication is a test.
Each time you send a communication, you are testing a set of assumptions – assumptions about what your prospects want and need in their buying process, about the format of the content, and about the places they want to consume it.
Every communication can tell us the “why” of our success or failure.
For each communication, you must devise a strategy to measure the effectiveness of the content. Each communication will have a set of primary KPIs.
An email newsletter may invite readers to purchase a new line of shoes, and to join your Facebook page as well. If the primary goal is to sell shoes, you must be able to measure the conversion rate of the email.
It isn’t sufficient to increase sales of the shoe. You must have a strategy to know how many sales were generated by this email.
Watch the Results
The final step of each communication – the step too often overlooked – is reviewing your results. When the communication has run its course, you simply look at the KPIs to learn the secrets desires of your audience.
Your marketing automation system should provide easy drill-down to the metrics that define the success of each effort.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master: Conclusions
You are sitting in the monthly executive meeting. You have created a slide deck with your top-level KPIs as reported by your marketing automation system. They are a summary of how your individual efforts have affected the bottom line.
When the questions come, you know the “why” and the “what’s next” for your marketing efforts. “Why did our conversion rates go down, but our revenue go up?” the VP of Sales asks.
You know the answer. You tick off the four or five programs that delivered solid results, and then list those that drew unqualified traffic to the site, stating that they will be modified or discontinued.
You’re a performance marketer.
The Business that Knows Grows
Each item of content you produce will have different versions, be available through multiple channels, and will be measured differently. Today’s online businesses won’t function without a useful marketing automation system, a tool that be used by many members of the team.
The Online Marketing Strategy Components aren’t linear, and businesses can expand their capabilities in any of these areas.
However, those businesses that dominate in their industry through online marketing will be proficient in all of the capabilities presented here.
Online Marketing Strategy Components Resources
For an explanation of KPIs read “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity” by Avinash Kaushik.
To develop touchpoint personas, read “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis.
For designing measurable social media campaigns, read “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Dave Evans
Online Marketing Strategy Components: Don’t Worry
The good news is that the folks at SiteTuners.com, lead by the always brilliant Tim Ash have put together the Conversion Conference.
The attendees will be leading the online charge in each of their industries.
I can think of no better way to get up the many learning curves that your conversion practice needs than this two day conference.
Topics at Conversion Conference include:
You’ve likely read books written by some of the Conversion Conference Speakers, like Landing Page Optimization and Web Design for ROI. There’s no question that the speakers at this conference are the folks you want to be learning from. Check it out. You can even save $250 if you use promo code CCE650 when you register on the Conversion Conference website.
If you won’t be there, I pray that your competitors won’t be either.
P. S. I do a complete writeup of the Online Marketing Strategy Components in The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook, Conversion Stack: Marketing Automation for Performance Marketers. It is free and you should find it enlightening.
What Would You Tell a Printer in this Digital Age?
Conversion Marketing StrategyNatives viewing the new world.
To my digital natives and online tribesman everywhere:
What would you tell the printing industry if you had one hour with them?
Think about it: The Printing Industry has been communicating with the world for centuries. While you could argue that they seem slow in adopting digital channels, I would argue that we’ve completely blocked print from our consciousness.
There is an ocean between our peoples.
I have an hour with the Printing Industries of America when I keynote their Converge Conference 2010. Attendees are the boldest of their members, the ones who are looking closely at cross-media business strategies.
Ultimately, I want to understand where the missed opportunities are. When we cross that ocean, what magical happens?
Colonizing the Digital New World
Here’s the setup I’m using for our printing-side brethren:
Welcome to the Digital New World! I am an ambassador for the people of this land. You have traveled far, across the mighty Sea of Apathy to arrive in this place. You have proven yourself as brave explorers. I am here to welcome you and show you around.
We have studied your strange ways and have seen the devices you have that display content without batteries or plugs. I’m sure we seem strange to you as well. Our customs are very different, but we have the same goals: understanding and prosperity.
During your visit, we will examine the differences between us, but more importantly, we will find new opportunities to work together; to combine your “old world” wisdom with our “new world” technology and to build great businesses.
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Brian Massey
Social Media Measurement Plan: Why It’s OK to be the Rainman
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn my last Conversion Science column I introduced you to the social media landing page. This landing page has the power to bring social media conversations to a measurable, business-building conversion. Let me show you how to develop the perfect social media measurement plan.
Social media is very important to us at Conversion Sciences. We know that education is the key to changing the web into a place where people find what they are looking for and reward companies for being so darn helpful.
Social media is a great way for us to share our educational and (hopefully) helpful stories, posts, columns and presentations. But to know how our efforts are performing, we need to create a social media measurement plan.
Why It’s OK to be the Rainman of Social Media
However, we aren’t really that good at social media conversations. It may come as no surprise that, as scientists, we are like the Rainman of social media. Like Raymond from the move, we are capable of amazing feats of insight and intelligence, but we often miss important social cues, especially when interactions occur 140 characters at a time.
“I’m an excellent Tweeter”
“I’m an excellent dancer.”
Given the fact that people like us sometimes have awkward digital interactions, you may not invite us to your swanky party. However, you certainly want us to participate in your social graph.
People like us provide an important service to the social spheres. Our content-oriented social media strategy feeds those who rely on social media for education and elucidation.
If you spend the bulk of your social time interacting with individuals, you are probably using a conversation-oriented social media strategy.
Choose the right social strategy
A conversion is more than just a conversation without the T&A.
In our studies, we have observed two broad categories of social media behavior:
While the posts, pictures and pokes that make up an online conversation certainly qualify as “content,” we distinguish conversational content from content that is specifically designed to educate, entertain or inform on a particular subject area.
This article is “content.” The comments you will inevitably leave are “conversation.”
We have found that content-oriented social strategies lead to more measurable campaigns. Plus, many conversion scientists don’t have the social skills to implement a conversation-oriented strategy.
Conversation-oriented social media
This strategy centers around conversations. It typically involves one or more personalities that interact with individuals in the social graph. This strategy is ideal for improving customer support, building awareness, personal branding and image marketing.
Conversations may involve content, but it is the interactions that are front-and-center in this strategy.
Results are typically measured using predictive metrics, such as friends, followers, likes, bookmarks, retweets and reach. These soft metrics are often more satisfying to us than definitive metrics such as leads, sales, and conversion rate.
I admire people like Kate Buck Jr. who make this strategy really work for their business and their clients.
Content-oriented social media
Unlike conversation-oriented strategies, this approach focuses on content as we’ve defined it here: communication that is designed to educate, entertain or inform. This strategy is ideal for lead generation, thought-leadership and building targeted social channels.
Content-oriented conversations don’t focus on the authoring brand or individual. Instead, these conversations circle around the content itself. This content will spur conversations, and ideally will be passed around, expanding our reach.
Of greatest interest to conversion scientists is that content draws visitors to social landing pages, where conversion beacons can drive business-building conversions.
Develop the Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan
It’s possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here’s how.
Step 1: Create some content.
The catch with the content-oriented strategy is that you must create content. Frequency is up to you. In a sixty-plus day experiment conducted here in the labs, five articles and seven blog posts drove 145 status updates, tweets, emails, Flickr images, etc.
We focused on articles that I write at The Conversion Scientist blog, that I contribute here at Search Engine Land and that I contribute at other venues such as ClickZ and the Content Marketing Institute.
Step 2: Devise a way to measure results.
To measure results, traffic must arrive on one of our instrumented pages. However, some of the content we used lived on other sites.
Our strategy was to create a social media landing page for each of our “off-world” articles in the form of a blog post. These posts teased the article and linked to it.
While we announce each new article through our social networks, the bulk of our marketing drove friends and followers to the blog post.
Right now, Google Analytics is our favorite single point of collection because of its content filtering and segmented reports.
For click tracking, Bit.ly still can’t be beat for its flexibility and integration with so many tools.
Step 3: Market each content item as if each was its own product.
Each of these content items gets a multi-network, multi-touch treatment designed to expose the maximum number of our friends and followers to this content. We maintain small but targeted social graphs on Facebook (<1000), Twitter (<2000) and LinkedIn (>1000).
On Facebook we did a single status post to my profile as well as “The Conversion Scientist” and “Web Strategies for Business” pages.
On Twitter each content item got between two and four tweets. We tried simply repeating the tweets as well as composing a series of unique tweets.
We did one LinkedIn status update, but did not post discussions on LinkedIn groups because the process couldn’t be automated. We’re looking for tools to help with this.
Several items got supporting posts on our predecessor site, the Customer Chaos blog.
All of this may sound like a lot of work. That is why we need tools to automate the process. Right now, Austin-based Spredfast seems to have the best support of the social networks we use, as well as one great collection point for analytics from across our social graph. Hootsuite is an alternative for those focusing on Twitter.
Note: We turned off all of our cross-network services, such as Ping.fm to implement this strategy.
Step 4: Attach a wireless tracking device.
This is real Hollywood stuff.
The most important feature of our measurement strategy is a wireless tracking device that we attached to each post, tweet, email and image. This is the secret sauce that enables the report shown above.
Bit.ly is the carrier for this wireless device. Google’s link tagging feature provides the micro circuitry.
Each post, tweet, image and email carries with it the following micro-coded information:
As an example, here is the fully instrumented URL for the link-tagging spreadsheet offered in this column.
The URL builder provided by Google is quite unsatisfying for us, so we’ve developed a special Google Analytics link tagging spreadsheet that you can use to create and track your micro-coded addresses.
Next time, I’ll show you the queries and reports that reveal which content, social networks and conversations generate the most email subscriptions for us.
In the mean time, let me know the social media distribution and tracking tools that you use and love in the comments section below.
Article originally published on my Search Engine Land column “The Perfect Social Media Measurement Strategy.”
Brian Massey
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Keep Your Content Promises and Increase Conversions
Conversion Marketing StrategyThese four ways set a series of events in motion that result in our visitors feeling… dumb. Make sure to keep your content promises to increase conversions.
Treat your content as a product
“Have you seen my sunglasses?’’ I yelled out to my wife as I was heading out the door.
“In our room on the night stand,” she yelled back.
Little did she know that she was setting in motion a series of events destined to ruin a fine Saturday.
You see, she unwittingly set an expectation in my mind, an expectation that my sunglasses would be there on the night stand beside the lamp and the book I read before bed.
But when I got to the bedroom, they weren’t there.
The series of events that unfolded next are classic human reactions, reactions that you may be creating in the way you present your content.
I entered stage one: I got angry. Not “throwing things” angry, but “disappointed because I just want to get out and do some errands but I’m attached to wearing my sunglasses when I’m out” angry.
Stage two: I got self conscious, so I looked all around the nightstand. Nothing.
Stage three: I got self righteous. I climbed down the stairs down to my wife, building my self-righteousness with every step.
“They’re not there,” I said, my voice dripping with thinly-masked disdain.
She looked at me with a face and stance that would have made our teenager proud.
“Did you look on my nightstand, too?”
Stage four: I questioned my very ability to function in the world. I slinked back up the stairs, retrieved the sunglasses and snuck out the door.
It was no fault of hers that I assumed the sunglasses would be on my night stand, but website visitors are coming with expectations.
When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set the exact same series of events in motion. This isn’t good for our business.
Keep Your Content Promises: What is the Psychological Price for Your Content
Our invitations, be they found in an email, a status update or a blog post must promise something or there would be no clicks.
Visitors may be finding and consuming our content just fine, but we can extract a severe price by making things unintuitive. Just because someone finds your content, doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.
Here are some of the innocent things we do to make our visitors feel frustrated.
1. The Drill Down
If your content link is sending your visitors to your home page or to a “resources” page, you’re setting them up for stage one anger.
Most people expect a click to take them to the very place that content exists. Don’t let them down.
Sure, you may have a logical navigation strategy.
Visitors are saying, “All you had to do was put a link to it on the page you sent me to.”
My wife assumed I would look on both night stands. I assumed she’d have specified the “other” one if that was where it was.
2. The Scroll
For many many visitors, if the content headline isn’t above the “fold” on your page, then it doesn’t exist. Period.
What would push the headline down? Usually, it’s a BAH (big-ass header). The BAH is usually some large stock photo plastered across the top of the page. This is a common feature of websites and is found on both home pages and interior pages.
Bosses love this kind of thing, but it foils visitors.
3. The Unending Preview
Too often, one BAH isn’t enough, so designers have invented the “flash scroller” also called a “rotator box.” If you are employing one of these to present content choices, you are WAY over-estimating the patience of even the most interested visitor.
Don’t make us sit through a series of cross-fading options.
An image fades in, then we wait.
Another image fades in, then we wait.
Another fade, then we wait.
We won’t last long. I probably lost dozens of readers just writing those three sentences.
4. The Wall of Questions
One of the best ways to generate leads is to promise great content in exchange for contact information. However, you must look at this as a purchase, not a gratuitous grab for their email address. Don’t present them with a wall of form fields and ask them to fill out the form.
This page asks a lot, but doesn’t promise much.
You have to sell them.
To this end, a proper lead generation page will have the following components:
This is what is expected when someone clicks on an invitation to read or view content.
Deviate from this basic formula only if you must. Otherwise, visitors may leave your site questioning their very ability to function in a digital world.
Brian Massey
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Touchpoint Personas for Persuasion and Empathy
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.
I will compare the concept of touchpoint personas vs buyer personas. If you are interested in user personas check them out on this article.
Personas are fictional representations of your customers designed to help you understand what to say to prospects and how to deliver content to them.
There is no better predictor of conversion success than the availability of personas.
The Anatomy of a Great Online Persona
Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer service support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online.
None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content.
Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver.
Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include to help you understand the customer.
Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions.
How is a touchpoint persona different from a buyer persona?
Those businesses with the most effective content marketing strategies are using buyer personas as their guide. But, buyer personas have the following limitations when it comes to creating a customer journey and its implementation:
Creating online touchpoint personas: the 7 Components
Here are the components of the touchpoint personas that Conversion Sciences creates for clients. Much of this has been adopted from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
1Demographics
Demographics play only a small part in the touchpoint persona. Age and gender give us an idea of their technical savvy and possible communication styles. Business role will be important for B2B and some B2C sales.
2Customer Commentary
The customer commentary answers the question, “Why are they coming to this site at this time in their lives?”
Unlike buyer personas, the customer commentary is written in the voice of the persona. This helps the marketing team empathize with the people visiting your site. It provides the proper vocabulary for writing and keyword research. Answer this question, and you will know exactly how to create content and ad copy for them.
3Mode of Persuasion
The customer commentary will tell you much about the way a certain kind of visitor is going to make a decision, from which you can identify their mode of persuasion.
Will they decide to take action quickly or slowly? Will they seek to decide emotionally or logically? The Eisenbergs outline four primary modes of persuasion to guide your designers and writers: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist and Spontaneous.
4Funnel Points or Customer Touchpoints
What is bringing the persona to this touchpoint, and where are they arriving?
List these scenarios here, and strive to get visitors close to their points of resolution as directly as possible. Don’t limit these touch points or funnel points to those currently in your marketing mix, but consider new outreach methods based on how these types of customers will find you.
5Points of Resolution
What are the important pieces of information this kind of visitor needs to feel comfortable and confident in taking action? This is your content guide, from which your editorial calendar will rise. Points of resolution may be as simple as “price and delivery” or as complex as “a full understanding of our manufacturing process.”
6Conversion Beacons and Conversion Points
The conversion beacon calls a visitor to action. A conversion point tells you that a visitor has taken action. In the online world, a big red button may serve as a conversion beacon, and a confirmation page may be the conversion point that tells you that a visitor has completed a form.
These map the visitors’ buying processes to the businesses’ selling processes. They also tell you which key performance indicators will gauge the success of your changes.
7Priority
Touchpoint personas are quite thorough and will generate more ideas than can be reasonably implemented, but one conversion beacon or one content item may have a significant impact on leads and sales.
The Eisenbergs recommend listing out the actions generated from these personas. Estimate the minimum time, positive impact and smallest effort for each of them on a scale from one to five. Add these three values together and start working on those with the highest total.
Keep your customer personas out of the drawer
Your touchpoint personas should influence your decisions, and they should evolve as you learn what is working and what is not. Don’t put them in a drawer when you’re done. Print them out and put them in your conference room or break room.
Consider placing them on a collaborative system so that the organization can change them organically.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is easy to create personas and customer journey maps, but it is more difficult to breathe life into them.
To thoroughly explore the power of touchpoint personas, I strongly recommend the book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg. For more on touchpoints please read Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Evans.
Do you use touchpoint personas or something similar? If so, are there additional things that you include?
The Anatomy of a Great Web Persona was originally published on a post for the Content Marketing Institute
P. S. Get full access to the Lab when you join The Conversion Scientist email list.
Your Explaining Face Will Change Your Content Marketing
Conversion OptimizationMy ten-year-old son gave me a valuable lesson in content marketing today.
Sean has a good friend who, to hear him tell it, rarely changes his expression. It’s just who he is.
However, Sean was sharing one of this friend’s more interesting ideas: to build a tall building and put a catapult at the top of it to deliver packages around town.
“Was he serious?” we asked.
“Yes,” said Sean. “He had his explaining face on.”
Clearly, when this boy puts on his ‘explaining face,’ you had better listen.
Sean gives words to an attitude that offers all of us a way to make our content more helpful, more interesting and more engaging.
We just need to put on our explaining face.
Your Selling Face or Your Explaining Face
I’ve got my explaining face on right now. It is different from my selling face.
When I have my explaining face on, my eyes are wider, my eyebrows go up, my jaw is drawn back to help me enunciate.
When I have my selling face on, my eyebrows come down and my forehead furrows. My jaw jets forward. I’m in your face.
How does your content change when you have your explaining face on? Mine does.
A Face for Every Occasion
There is a place for each of your faces.
You should use your explaining face when you are participating in what I call an Attention-managed Zone. As I write in my most recent ClickZ column, an attention-managed zone is a place where we have curated the participants or content.
Our Facebook page is an attention-managed zone. Our inbox and our feed reader are as well.
When you are communicating within one of these attention-managed zones, put on your explaining face.
However, when you have drawn someone to your site, to a landing page for instance, you will want to put on your selling face and be more persuasive. Visitors expect to learn about your offering in these places where they have no control over what they will see.
Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society
As marketers and advertisers, we are bombarded with statistics that tell us there is a shockingly small supply of time in the world.
I would provide citations for these statistics, but “Article writers only have an average of 15 minutes for research, down from 30 minutes in 2007.” I made that last one up.
We believe we’re dealing with the scarcity of our prospects’ time, and are acting accordingly. Too often, we’re getting “all caps” on our audience, shouting louder, shouting more often, and shouting through more channels. I call that tossing “Jenny” around.
What if we worked the other end of the equation? What if we helped our prospects manage their time better? Could we get nine seconds instead of eight? Could we cut our Millennials down to five simultaneous activities?
Unfortunately, attempts at time management have been thwarted in large part by the social part of our brains, the part that says we need to be laced into the lives of others like tangled doilies.
I can cite these quotes because they come from a “Socialnomics” video that is only four and a half minutes long.
The net of this is that we are spending more time on our digital social pursuits and less time on our commercial messages, such as those found in display advertising.
The Components of an Attention-Managed Zone
An attention-managed zone provides a cone of safety, like a playpen for our children. We check Facebook several times per day because it’s an attention-safe zone. The same is true of e-mail.
When my attention is focused on one of these safe places, I know that:
Be Where Attention Falls
It seems that we are willing to “kill” time on social networks because it helps us manage our attention.
More and more, we rely on our social graph to keep us in the loop, often 140 characters at a time. Thomas puts this into the category of “attention management.”
The tools we choose and the people we follow make up our attention management strategy. Those places where we implement such strategies – Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon – are “attention-managed zones.”
“Attention wastelands” are those places in which we receive irrelevant information; places that are populated by people and brands that we don’t trust. Prospects must shun these wastelands lest their attention be squandered by fools.
Let me put on my selling face to help persuade you of its value.
Your selling face delivers what your business needs to grow and thrive. If you are afraid to promote your products your online marketing strategies will most likely fail.
Your selling face is a powerful, and you should put it on if you want:
If you want captivating headings and pages that turn visitors into readers and then buyers, then put on your selling face today.
Act now and receive a Thinking Face at no additional charge.
Signs that You’re Wearing Your Explaining Face
If you’re new to face management, here are a few signals that you have your explaining face on:
Ironically, these are also the markers of good sales copy, when you should have your selling face on.
Nonetheless, I recommend that you mentally put on your explaining face when you want to write for social media, for your blog or anywhere else that your reader has control.
Your explaining face content will give them reason to stay tuned in.
P. S. Don’t for get to read my ClickZ column Advertising in an Attention-Managed Society.
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Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come
Conversion Marketing Strategy, Lead GenerationIn my most recent ClickZ column, I reflect back on my days as a marketing cog in the corporate machine, a time in which the practice of “appending” was considered “black hat.”
Appending is the practice of adding contact information to records in your prospect database. If you have someone’s name and company, you could “append” their email address and mailing address through a number of services that keep that kind of information.
Companies that sell mailing lists often provide this kind of service.
The thinking was that the prospect hadn’t given you permission to contact them through these other channels, and that it violated the “submit button contract” that is implied when they completed an online form.
Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come. Source: Unbounce.
We’ve come a long way
Oli Gardner has an interesting infographic on the Unbounce blog. The graphic highlights a tool called FlowTown. This is a social media appending tool. Marketers can use it to find the social media accounts of their prospect list, and begin marketing to them through those social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.
This is where those of us who have been around the block groan, and then secretly cheer.
Social Media Appending: Why this is different
While appending has not been considered a best practice, it happens. In fact, the best way to do this is to send ask your prospects for permission after appending the data; sending them an email asking if they want email messages, for example.
Many social media platforms allow us to easily “unfriend” or block unsavory marketers. This puts the opt-out capability in our hands. So asking for permission ahead of time is less of a problem.
But there is a right way to inject yourself into someone else’s conversations. It’s called a Content-oriented Social Media Strategy.
If you’re going to jump into the social conversations, do it right, or it will backfire in a very public, viral way.
Visual Live Blog: Dan Zarrella on Twitter, Facebook and More
Conversion OptimizationSo I resorted to banal prose in my notes.
As a fellow scientist (Dan is the Social Media Scientist), I am happy to borrow from his work in doing my own. Here are my notes from Dan’ presentation at PubCon Masters Group Training. I was glad to share the stage with him.
Dan Zarrella Twitter and Facebook Optimization Notes.
Getting More Followers
“The best way to get followers is to follow people.”
To get more followers:
Twitter
The twenty most retweeted words:
Twitter Stats
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Visual Live Blog: Andy Beal Reputation Management
Conversion Marketing StrategyHere are my notes from Andy Beal’s excellent PubCon Masters Group Training on reputation management.
You can see Andy as well as an incredible lineup of talent at the PubCon Las Vegas Masters Group Training, November 8.
Reputation Management Infographic
Andy Beal: Your Google Reputation Stinks Infographic.
Andy Beal Reputation Management Favorite Excerpts
Six key tips from Andy:
When Under Attack
Be sure to get an early alert. Do a Google audit monthly.
Protect your online reputation.
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Conversion Alert: Invisibility Ray Hurts Email Open Rates and Click-through Rates
Conversion OptimizationEveryone who seeks to do good in the world will inevitably be challenged by an arch-nemesis; someone who’s view of the world is diametrically opposed to yours.
At Conversion Sciences we have Customer Chaos Labs, whose motto is:
They are an organization who seeks to lift their clients’ online Web success by simply bringing everyone else down. We see them as basically evil.
This week, one of our clients became the victim of a new Customer Chaos technology: an email invisibility ray.
The results are devastating.
Don’t fall victim to invisible emails.
Proof of the Invisibility Ray’s Existence
The folks at J’Tote Bags crafted a beautiful email, with professional photography, strong reasons to buy, and clear calls to action.
Then, J’Tote sent the email to eager prospects and customers. Somewhere in transit, many of these emails entered the range of the invisibility ray.
The invisibility technology rendered the email almost completely invisible to the human eye. Clearly, an invisible email is going to be read less, depressing open rates and clicks.
Conversion Sciences Defense Technology
Conversion Sciences has worked with the major email clients to develop a “de-cloaking” technology. For example, recipients can restore the email by clicking “Display Images below” in Gmail, or “Click here to download pictures” in Outlook.
Most email clients have implemented something similar.
The problem is that many recipients of your emails may not find a good reason to click on the de-cloaking links if they can’t see the email.
Clearly, this is not an ideal solution.
Defending Yourself Against the Invisibility Ray
A detailed analysis by Conversion Sciences has exposed some weaknesses in the invisibility ray.
It only works on images
Apparently, the invisibility ray doesn’t affect text, but only images. Thus a proper defense against this kind of attack is to use images more sparingly in your email and place text strategically around the email.
This will allow readers to understand the point of the email if the images have been inviso-rayed.
Image “Alt” Text is Sometimes Impervious
If you look closely at Exhibit B, you will see some text appearing in places where the images would have appeared. This is the images’ “alt” text and is created using the “alt” parameters in the HTML <img> tag.
Here’s an example:
<img src=”picture.jpg” alt=”Text that describes the image” />
Use the “alt” text to tell the reader what they will see if they click “Display images below” and invoke the de-cloaking technology.
This does not work in all email clients. Microsoft Outlook won’t show these cues, for example.
However, some email clients will actually allow you to format your “alt” text, making it different sizes and colors.
Conversion Alert: Don’t Fall Victim to Invisible Emails
Email remains one of the most effective online marketing tools available. No wonder the foes of good marketing have targeted it for disruption.
Let a Conversion Scientist review your email strategy. This will ensure that
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