What are Rich Snippets and how to create them?

Rich snippets are a way of tagging specific types of content so that Search Engines and web services can use them to display additional information in search results or share to other sites. Most Search Engines now support rich snippets and are constantly extending them as he announcement this week from Google about the new "Listings" Snippets shows.

Why use them?

Rich Snippets are still relatively new in terms of how they are been used and many websites have yet to even implement them. With the growth of HTML 5, however, they are slowly working their way into websites. This creates an opportunity for early adopters to: Improve a users experience to your website Improve the quality of information given to Search Engines (Product price, reviews etc are two examples) Increased traffic through higher click-through rates Ensure Search Engines…
This time next year it will be the 30th anniversary of Email. This is a great infographic (see full interactive version) reminding us of how email has grown in importance for consumers and marketers and the challenges of managing it such as deliverability and rendering across different email readers. Email use is still on the rise. Did you know that the number of email accounts grew from 1.8 billion to 3.1 billion between 2009 and 2011? …

Our interview with Jordie van Rijn of Email Vendor Selection

When I’m running training courses on email marketing, there are almost always marketers on the course who are dissatisfied with their current email provider or are just looking to move up from using Outlook to send emails. I’m always happy to give recommendations on email services and encourage others on the course to share suppliers they’re happy with. The problem with just basing your decision on recommendations is, of course, that every business has different needs according to their size and how they want to use Email marketing. So the question becomes “how do we decide on the right email service provider for us?” As independent email marketing consultant and founder of the Email Vendor Selection, I thought Jordie van Rijn would be an excellent person to help answer this question. Jordie specializes in email marketing and event-driven campaigns and his company…

Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - know your hype cycle

I'm noticing a lot more innovation roles in larger organisations recently. It's great to see companies investing in understanding technology and marketing trends to try to create a roadmap for prioritising and implementing innovative digital technologies for marketing applications. If you're involved in digital strategy, you'll be constantly making judgements and doubtless arguing with colleagues about which innovations are most relevant to  your organisation. Here are a couple of tools to help.

The Gartner Hype Cycle model for technology innovation

You may well know the Gartner Hype cycle since this has been published for over 10 years I think - here is the latest one, with this post from Gartner giving more detail.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2011

Gartner's latest Hype Cycle was released in August 2011. This is an interesting release since they have more detail of how the audience…

How can B2B companies use video to attract, engage and improve conversion without falling into the gimmick trap?

Integrating video into a website and sharing through video sites has great potential to build awareness and establish trust before a transaction. We're now seeing many more marketers using video as discussed in my previous post on inbound B2B marketing. In this post I'll use examples to review different approaches B2B companies can use video to really bring their offering to life.

Using video to help with visibility in search

At the last check, it was estimated that approximately 48 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is a video when video search dominates internet search? This data from YouTube is further supported by a recent survey which confirmed that B2B marketers need to focus on videos and images as part of their SEO…

A major Facebook update to privacy and sharing settings also phases out Places

Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook blog announcement

Our commentary on Facebook update

Most sites have reported this update as a response by Facebook to Google+. It’s true that Facebook has surfaced features to make it easier to share with a custom group of friends (sound similar to G+ Circles?): What we found most interesting in this update was this quote: We are phasing out the mobile-only Places feature. Settings associated with it are also being phased out or removed. (You can read more about how location works and settings affected here. So Facebook is killing off the Places sub-brand, but the functionality seems to be continuing as a more integrated and less memorable “Share where you are”. It’s now a much more subtle feature, but once switched on will show all your locations until…

Our summary of the IPA new models of marketing effectiveness report

As marketers, we use the expression “integrated campaign” often, but of course in practice, the degree to which campaigns are truly integrated across channels varies. Recently the IPA released a new report models of marketing effectiveness which  shows the popularity of alternative options for campaign integration. It’s certainly an exhaustive study with analysis of over 250 IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies, entered over a seven-year period (2004-2010) including examples from Hovis, O2, Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, E4 Skins, Johnnie Walker and more. I hope our writeup is useful in helping prompt ideas on how you can tackle integration.

4 Options for integrated campaign planning

The report defines 4 options for integration. Analysis of campaign effectiveness reviewed hard measures including sales gain, market share gain, reduction of price sensitivity, customer retention, customer acquisition, profit gain and market share defence. Soft measures reviewed include brand awareness,…

More referrals from the t.co domain means you should check how you track Twitter within Google Analytics

Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: The Next Web

Our commentary on the New Twitter tracking

Last week Twitter quietly changed it’s method of linking from tweets through to sites. It didn’t post it to its main blog but it was reported by The Next Web - see link above - thanks Dan Barker for alerting me to this.  However, the Next Web didn’t go into the details of how this could affect your analytics, which is what we’re alerting you to here. What this means in practice is that if you are active in Twitter you will see a sharp increase in referrals from T.co domains which is what we’ve seen: Note that the traffic using other shortened URLs such as bit.ly or Ow.ly, which is a big…

Some practical tips for email and web copywriting

Chunking is breaking your copy up into easily scannable paragraphs. Chunking is more effective for your online readers, here’s why…

This is how non-chunked copy looks to your readers

It’s a mountain to climb…

This is how chunked copy looks

I can manage this! Usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote the definitive study showing that most users don’t read online, they scan. Until recently you had to read his classic 1997! study, but now these sketches give better proof. Thanks, to Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports for saying we could share the sketches from his original copywriting tip on Smart Insights.

More chunking tips

To add to Mark's original, some tips that I’d add to make your chunking in email marketing more effective are that: The first 2-3 words matter most. As a user scans a web page or…

Creating a balance between sales optimisation and marketing

When did you last run a campaign that sought to engage a market, to really engage and inspire potential customers rather than focusing on selling to those already in buying mode? We were discussing this several months ago and talked to Imran Farooq, another Smart Insights contributor who also trains marketers. We were saying it seems that many digital marketers today, and marketers more generally, don't seem to run campaigns so much outside of what is really day-to-day optimisation and sales promotion, so prompting the questions why is that? And, are we right? When we think of campaign planning at Smart Insights, we consider campaigns to be platforms that sit on top of day-to-day marketing where the focus is sales and optimising marketing around generating sales today. The day-to-day activities are what we (and many others) call business as usual (BAU), where we're…