Welcome to the Escape Blog

From Freshview - our favourite e-mail software company, comes this presentation about the future of e-mail design (and marketing).

And a quote from the notes that I will be using in my next few meetings:

Email isn’t dead, it’s just a bit fat.

An ever attractive form of creating awareness online is with the use of creating a viral campaign. That said, making something viral is not the goal.

It’s the same way an illness gets transmitted virally, when contact is made between one person and another. Proliferation happens when one person comes into contact with many, and so on.

One person passing something to 10 people multiplied just five times = 100,000 people.

That’s why creating a marketing message that becomes viral is so powerful, the key word being BECOMES.

As marketers we can not make something successful, in the same way that a musician can not guarantee a successful record.

What we can do is give people a reason to pass something on. When the initial product is good, the Internet and motivation to ‘tell our friends’ are the methods to pass that on.

So, work on the rule that there are really only two aspects of the technique that you can really control:

1. We can create the great product/marketing message in the first place. Something worthwhile, different and WORTH talking about.
2. We can start the ball rolling by initially talking to the right people. Tactics can be employed but they need to be appropriate.

Two Books these points remind me of:

1. Seth Godin - Purple Cow. A book about being remarkable, ie. something worth remarking on to someone else. (Wikipedia Ref.)
2. Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point. Learn why it’s important who you tell and the way you tell them if you want something to catch on. (Wikipedia ref.)

Examples

I was discussing this with Lorraine and Sarah-Anne over at Wildfire PR this morning and Lorraine sent this great example - Free Rice. If you like word play, you’ll love it.

The point is this. When it’s done right, it works. People can;t wait to tell their friends.

But, I can imagine there are a hell of a lot of micro sites and ‘viral’ campaigns out there with no-one watching. One, because they are force-fed to the audience rather than allowed to become viral. And two, because the concept is not that remarkable in the first place.

I have been tempted to the free web stats package that is Google Analytics having been a massive fan of Hitslink for so long, which costs from $10 per month.

Cost wasn’t the main reason though. I have always been put off by Analytics delay in delivering results and it’s more generic feel. It does what I guess it should - displays less specific reporting information to gather trend data.

There are pros and cons for both systems however:

Hitslink

Pro

• It’s real time allowing you to be very responsive*
• Easy interface allows you to drill down into the nitty gritty data
• More comprehensive reporting with multiple graph views for data - houry, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Cons

• It costs - prices start at $10 per month - e-commerce measurement is more expensive
• Can’t discern between pay per click and natural search traffic
• Code needs hacking to deal with pay-per-click visitors otherwise each PPC visitor page is seen as different from the actual page, confusing the stats

(* I find this very helpful with a new e-commerce solution to track where a specific order came from. This feature also helped me sell a lot of a specific product once when it was reviewed one Sunday morning in a newspaper magazine.)

Analytics

Pro

• Free and easy to set up
• Ability to set goals allows you to optimise your site more effectively.
• Integrates with Pay Per Click automatically -allowing you to measure natural vs. PPC visitors

Cons

• It’s about three hours behind real time
• The data is sometimes to generic, requiring you to keep drilling down too far
• Lack of incremental reporting - ie. month on month

Summary

I find my transition to Analytics works very well with standard websites, but I feel uncomfortable with the delay in reporting for my e-commerce sites and would tend to actually run both. This isn’t the best answer as it may slow down the website running the stats.

The delay of reporting that Analytics has, has allowed me to to take a bigger picture view of my websites checking stats once a day, rather than every few hours.

Every person who cares about success on their website should be measuring their stats. Analytics is a great product, especially the price tag, and delivers data that, without a doubt, can help you improve your website. Any start-up should load this product and learn how it works.

However, when it comes to e-commerce, my nerves tell me to have Hitslink for the real time response. There’s nothing like running a sale alongside an e-mail campaign and adapting the messages as results happen.

E-Consultancy had an article about a recent study by Reevoo for YouGov about shopping online habits.

The basis of the reports states that comments and product reviews by consumers do sway new buyers but questions the accuracy of the reviews and calls for a more regulated system.

Third party endorsements are powerful way of selling and the larger retails can afford to offer consumer opinion on products, because they can switch suppliers and are not reliant on a small product range.

This is an ongoing theme on the web at the moment - Answerability. Too many people are doing to many things on line with a view to staying anonymous, with extreme cases of bad blog comments, and Cyber bullying through Facebook.

The questions is as with all media. How independent can any comment actually be?

The pay per click model allows you to target search terms. It was only a matter of time before advertising started getting even more targeted and with a model such as Facebook, which holds a lot more personal information about a person, their new advertising platform could be one to watch.

Facebook advertising gives you…

• Advanced Targeting - target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
• Flexible Pricing - cost per click or cost per impression.
• Trusted Referrals - attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

While it’s still yet to be seen whether Facebook can go the distance as a business model,  and I have my doubts, it’s  a very cost effective way to do some low cost advertising as an early adopter.

Probably one of the coolest tools I have found on the Internet regarding vector art is this one from VectorMagic

Its an online auto-tracer that converts bitmap, Jpegs, Tiffs etc into vectorized art. Check one of my results out…

People see what they want to see with blinkers on. It’s worth bearing that in mind when you are selling what you sell. Your criteria and theirs probably don’t match.

For instance, watch this video and count the number of times the team with white tee shirts CATCH the ball. (scroll down when you have your answer)

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Now, watch the video again without concentrating on anything, simply watch the video. Do you notice anything strange?

I believe that one of the most important (and hardest to create) elements of a growing web presence is content. The pressure to create news and articles is often too much for a company and many a ‘news’ section of a website is at least six months out of date. It’s a crime really and any website that suffers from this would do well to remove their news section.

I also tire of seeing generic marketing text on pages, which is non-specific and sparce. Yes, you probably need more that one paragraph to explain what your company does.
That said, there are companies that generate a hell of a lot of content and don’t put it on their websites. Case studies and commentar, often used for PR, is an ideal source of content for your own website. Appropriately crafted and placed on a website or Blog, you create two things:

1. Authority - you know what you are talking about
2. Attraction - search engines will reference your page, people may link to it

One thing NOT to do though, stick it behind a subscribe to read page. That is unless, you actually sell content online.

Go on - start being attractive!

A bit of a formal announcement. Simon Calderbank, our Sales Director has left the company today after 14 months.

This is a company decision and a sad one to make and is purely a cost-cutting excercise as far as The Escape is concerned.

We all wish Simon well for the future. It’ll be quiet with ya.

Great viral based parody of the Cadbury’s Gorilla here for Wonderbra… love it.

I will have to link to the You Tube video because they have disabled the embed from it, which is a bit of a mistake in my world. Still a great advert thought… especially the strap at the end.