Strategy of a Circle Campaign

Often times we tend to run single focus campaigns. It could be just an email blast or a blog or a facebook post or just a print mailing. To me, it’s an incomplete attempt to engage your audience. I am a huge believer of what I call “campaigns in tandem”.

Let’s say you are thinking about a campaign where either you are promoting an event or sending out an offer or just talking about your business in general.

The first step is of course getting your messaging nailed. In other words, we start by attempting to answer the who, what, when, & why :

• Who’s my audience?
• Why should they be interested in this particular offer/ event/news?
• What message worked with them in the past?
• What channels should I be focusing on?
• What time line am I thinking of?
• What are my goals?
• How do I drive the above audience towards these goals?
• What’s my call to action?

Next we turn to the “ how”  . With the call to action in place  , we need to drive a multi-channel or as I like to call it, multi-touch-point campaign. Here’s  just a sample of channels we could use.

Now as I mentioned this is definitely not an exhaustive list of channels. You could additionally rope in videos , word of mouth and then there is of course the press. But not all campaigns and events are press worthy. So you might need to pitch selectively.

Whatever you do, how small or big your campaign is , always think about multi-touch-points and the impact of the collective reach of these channels.

Also, always.. always.. intertwine them !

Post your blog on your facebook and tweet your facebook link. That way you take care of 3 touch points at the same time. Do the same with any LinkedIn group you are part of .

Specific campaign email blasts should include your social media links, be tagged correctly for conversion attribution and be directed to a special landing page on your web site. The web site absolutely must have a full or a partial page dedicated for the campaign.

The print piece of the campaign should tie in seamlessly with your online marketing in terms of messaging and having the social media sites listed. However, due to the higher cost involvement with print, target it to your best performing list and leave the rest of the audience in the hands of web. Trust me, they’ll be well taken care of .

If you are running a paid campaign, make sure to include an adgroup with ads reflecting the campaign message. Have it land on the campaign page of your website. I wouldn’t worry too much about SEO at this point. All the cross links coming in from different channels and the rich quality of your content is taking care of your organic ranking in the background.

Running multi-touch campaigns of course has its own challenges. The  biggest one is the amount of logistics involved. It’s critical & imperative to tie them in a timely fashion. The other big one is the conversion attribution by channel for ROI purposes. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

At the end of the day , the ROI justifies all labor.

Now it’s your turn.. How much of this are you doing? What are the challenges? Are you going beyond? Tell us all about it.

We’ll also be talking about all of this and more at the 1^st Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit , right here in beautiful Burlington, amidst the dazzling fall colors in September.

Hope to see you all there.

Best,

Bibi



Building and Tracking Emails with Link Tagging

I recently launched Curve Trends Marketing website. One of the channels I am considering for announcing the launch is an email campaign. Almost all of the businesses I work with or know of, continue to adopt this time tested channel, be it for newsletters, new offers or even for  product launch/event announcement.

A big challenge we face as analysts while analyzing email performance for clients is the lack of proper link tagging. So, while drafting the email newsletter, I thought, why not address this as I build the link tags.

What is email link tagging & why do them

Tracking email campaign performance in Web Analytics is done using a process called link tagging.  A typical email contains between five to unlimited number of links. The primary goal of these  links is pretty much the same. They are all directed to a landing page, which more often than not is a page on your website. The tagging also enables you to associate all visitor actions (like conversions and transactions) with the email.

Let’s look at this sample link..

http://www.curvetrends.com/

If someone clicks on it and lands on the home page, I would never know who they are, where they came from, and more importantly, why are they on this page .

So, here’s I how am going to tag it :

http://www.curvetrends.com/?utm_source=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement-list1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Once the email is deployed and someone clicks on this link, the resulting url will be not just  http://www.curvetrends.com/ but the whole phrase above. This is also a good way to test your links to see if they are tagged before you send out your email.

How to do what I just did

As you can see, I added a bunch of additional info to the URL. They’re called link tagging parameters. The name of the parameter is on the left side of the equal sign and the value of the parameter is on the right side.

utm_medium=email
utm_source=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement-list1
utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Now let’s try and explain the logic and the process behind building each of these parameters.

utm_medium

The medium tells us what platform the visitor selected to come to the website. I always prefer using “email”. It’s easy and simple and does it’s job. I never recommend adding any extra value or description to this. As you’ll see later, using a single value “email” simplifies the process of consolidating all emails into one line item for reporting purposes.

utm_source

Let me try and simplify the best way to define a source so as not to complicate things during reporting. Always and I insist on this.. always start with the date of the email , followed by the name of the list.Think about it in terms of who you are sending this email to and the date. For example, some of you might choose to send a certain newsletter to just your customers. In that case you can name it as

utm_source=02-25-2010-xxxnewsletter-customer-list.

Others might want to segment their list differently. But you get the point. Assign the date & whom you are sending to as your source value.

utm_campaign

Think of the marketing campaign that the email is a part of.In this instance, it’s my website’s launch.

utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Keep in mind that a campaign has several different medium. Email is just one of them. Paid ad , a banner on your website or a press release could be several other parts of that campaign. One thing I would make sure is that all of these have the same campaign name, so that you can club them together while reporting for performance evaluation.

utm_content

There is another parameter that I have not used here is the utm_content.You can choose to use utm_content when there are more than one versions of the email. For example, if I choose to offer two different discounts for the same audience and try to test which works better, I’ll use utm_content. These would be then my two versions of the content:

utm_content= 02-25-2010-one_month_free_analytics_report.

utm_content =02-25-2010-300_off_first_month_invoice

But unless you really have a lot of content variations to test, this could be an overkill in terms of data capture.

utm_term

This is another parameter that I have not added as it is relevant for those of you who are spending on paid advertising. Take the top paid keywords ( unbranded) from your web analytics report and plug them here. If the email is on a product, focus on the top paid keywords on that particular product.

What is a good resource to actually help build these tags

I would recommend using Google’s free URL builder as a very good starting point.

Just use the above logic to fill in the values. For example, in the campaign source, I am going to fill in the value : 02-25-2010-xxxnewsletter-customer-list. Same with others.

The Fun Part- Reporting

Why fun? Because all the above values you added , will now get pulled into your analytics report .You would actually be seeing them and analyzing the performance of your campaign based on those values.

I always start with the campaign. After all, email is almost always part of the bigger campaign.

This report lists all the values of your utm_campaign parameters. Now select the name of the campaign that your email was part of and then select medium. You will see a list of medium that was part of this particular campaign including email.

In this case we only used one medium (email) for the campaign.

You can then click on the email to get the source and content details for this particular campaign.

Speaking of details, you want to understand not only visits, pages/visit and/or average time on site but also conversion metrics. They are available in the goal tab. The above account is an instance of a non-ecommerce site. For sites with ecommerce, you can also find out the amount of sales, net revenue and finally the ROI of this campaign in a third tab named Ecommerce. Sweet!

Make sure to combine the above with the metrics provided by your email provider. Metrics like open, unsubscribe, click through, and bounce rates.

Now, enjoy your new found power and utilize it to its potential. Let us know if you are able to leverage the benefits. Have you done anything different in the past? If so, how? For those of you who are already tagging links, please share your experience with us.

Best,

-Bibi

In search of benchmarks

Most of the small businesses I talk to or have worked with, have a common concern for lack of available industry trends. We depend on either inside contacts, published competitor collateral or just plain old snooping around, in order to find out the current industry trends and offerings. As a result , small business leadership is plagued by lack of actionable industry benchmarks . ..how to understand where exactly their performance stand in terms of either the brand position or established benchmarks.

Google Analytics does a pretty good job with it’s benchmarking tool. It lets the businesses assess how their website compares against some of the industry verticals. I find this tool to be one of GA’s biggest strength.More so, since, there is so little actionable benchmark data available for small accounts( read business).

There’s one catch though. You have to have your data sharing with Google & other benchmarking tools enabled. Sometimes that can be the deal breaker. However, I’ve always been in favor of data sharing when it comes to Google ,since they do this anonymously . All identifiable data from your website is removed before it’s merged with other sites in comparable industry. There is no way you identify any of yours or your competitor’s data from the aggregated result . There is a bonus factor too. With your data sharing enabled, you also gain access to Google’s Conversion Optimizer that lets you adjust your bids to maximize conversions at the minimum price in Adwords .

The initial data presented takes into account all businesses of similar size. But you might want to drill down to your specific trade. GA actually lets you do that. This way you can ensure that the data is more pertinent to your particular business. In this example, I wanted to look at not only travel but even further ; Adventure travel players.

6 top level metrics data over the given timeline is displayed against the benchmark. It’s important to note that all figures are time dependent. Daily variations are possible due to parallel marketing campaigns and other promotional efforts. But comparing similar industry rules out any skew from the seasonality of the business since the seasonal trends of these companies are mostly alike.

Visits is the most basic top level measurement for any industry follower. The fact that in this example webpage visits are over 25% down from the industry benchmark, right away tells them to get their acts together and start working on improving the web site, spending more on paid search ,improve the quality of the links , landing pages and keywords , get more affiliate partners and network better on social media. Unless, this is a new brand, in which case, a benchmark has been established for them to work on. More on that in a min.

New visits= prospects= incremental sales. This is therefore such a key metric ,especially for new products or brands that just launched. The fact that in this example the new visits are about 5% over benchmark, almost tells me that it’s a new brand working to attract prospects and is generating a lot of interest. Over time, however, they can expect this figure to travel south and as long as it stays around 72% (which is the established benchmark)there should be no concern. Expectations set..Bingo!

Bounce rate – Anyone who has worked with me is aware of my obsession with this metric. I don’t know if I am obsessed or despise it, but for sure I can’t live without it. The fact that I’ve worked so hard to get this visitor to come witness my great offering and that he/she is leaving my site right away , without even giving me a second chance, kills me. If it was possible I would recommend the whole world wide web community to solely work towards bringing all bounce rate down to zero, and ban the word bounce rate. But hey.. that’s the extremist me. Sobering down..the bounce rate should never climb above 30%.. end of discussion. Even the benchmark bounce rate( 60%) in this example is super high. But it is what it is. Let’s accept it & move on.

Average time on site – I would definitely like my visitor to stay on. But there are times when we have them land on a page where all information is provided and they choose to just not look around. I am not sure I like that but that definitely brings down the average time spent on my site. That’s why we need benchmarking. If the visitor is spending around 5 mins on competitor’s site , am I not providing the quality experience for him/her to spend that much time on mine? What else can I do in terms of value proposition or in terms of uniqueness to improve that? On the other hand, if I am above the Industry benchmark.. oh well.. what can I say.. I ‘ve stopped bragging these days.

Pageviews & Pages /Visit – Benchmarking this can be counterproductive. That’s just me. Maybe it’s due to the nature of the business I handle. I am currently establishing a brand whose web site have a lot of information on single pages. Also, the page views depends on your product mix .Similar information can be served in different combination and layouts. But you might have a different perspective on this. Why don’t you share?

There is something else about benchmarking in GA that stands out for me- Able to visualize my brand positioning. Let’s look at these two examples.

The first one exceeds the benchmarking for every possible metric.From a top level, this is a leader to me. The alfha male!

Compared to that.. here’s another brand in the same category tracked over the same period of time. Does it tell you anything?. Look carefully. Compare it’s results to the industry benchmark. To me, it’s either a weak and a struggling brand or a new brand trying to make it’s mark.More likely, the later.. looking at the new visits.

What did I miss? How are you guys benchmarking your data? What are your sources? How do you validate? Please share with us.
Till then,
Happy Benchmarking

Bibi