How to increase loading times and keep web visitors happy
Loading Times: Are They THAT big of a deal?
Web performance optimisation, or WPO, is a term that relates to the various techniques IT specialists use in order to increase the speed in which websites are downloaded and displayed on a user’s web browser.
You may be thinking, “what a waste of time – most pages load quickly enough, and what difference is a few seconds going to make?” Well, honestly, you’d be surprised. And, more often than not, we’re talking milliseconds rather than seconds.
In fact, according to this compendium of web performance stats by Radware, there are 55 reasons why you need to optimise your website’s performance and page loading times:
44 percent of online shoppers claim that a slow transaction increases their anxiety about that purchase.
Online shoppers remember load times as being 35 percent longer than they actually were.
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Make sure you remember your target audience aren't always like you. Write emails for them, not you.
I collect first names on my newsletter sign-up form, but I never use them.
[Cue embarrassed silence and nervous shuffling among the experts out there.]
Yes, it’s an email marketing no-no. The extra form field hurts sign-up rates and it raises expectations that subsequent emails will be personalized more than they are. The survival of my “first name” field is partly down to the delusion that I’ll bite the personalization bullet “sometime soon”.
Call me a database coward. But it also survives because seeing those first names acts as a necessary reminder that my emails go to, um, human beings. As in many online industries, the idea that the audience actually includes sentient beings is often trampled into oblivion by our technology focus and the words that go with it:
Targets, segments, cells, addresses, clusters, groups, samples, lists, databases,…
Dan Grech interviews David Wood about his email marketing strategy
I’ve been here for about five years and had been doing email for about three years beforehand. I started off working in B2B, at an IT distributor, which was very different to what I do now. And back then I was much more hands-on; creating the emails, structuring, planning, copywriting, all of that stuff.
I wanted to get more immediate results, so I moved into the retail space. The opportunity came up for Email Marketing Manager at Direct Wines, which covered off working with Laithwaite’s, Sunday Times, Averys, and others, so it was ideal really. Within my current role, I directly manage one, but indirectly manage a team of about eight. That includes writers, creatives, HTML, so it kind of covers quite a range.
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5 Questions to help set, manage and review your content marketing effectiveness
As we accept that our consumers are learning about, and navigating through, more and more information about our brand, organisation, industries or topic areas as they research online, we're needing to deploy more sophisticated strategies in order we can earn attention, and importantly trust. This is what sits behind the drive of content marketing's rise to the forefront of the digital marketing agenda.
Content marketing is starting to mature, too. More and more reports, such as this from the Aberdeen Group, illustrate this, here too.
An easy start-point
Below is a simple matrix of ideas to help you set the KPIs or metrics based on what we've used on different projects. We're not saying "this is the way you must do it" or that you need to use all of these KPIs. Instead, we hope this is a useful framework…
Big majority of marketers now highly focused on user experience
Good news for those annoyed by horrifically complex user journeys, marketers are finally paying attention to your plight! It's probably good news for marketers as well, as a lack of focus on customer journey will mean prospects dropping out of your marketing funnel left right and centre.
The chart below based on data from the programmatic ad agency Celtra, show how many marketers have been awakened to importance of customer experience. Very close to half said it was a high priority, whilst another quarter declared it was their highest priority. For those 22% who are laggards who don't think about it, you may want to consider it! Although in fairness, it may be a flaw in the survey given that there was no 'not applicable option'.
Source: …
Write better copy to get better results
I once had a tarantula walk over my hand. The experience comes to mind every time I face a blank piece of paper. A rising sense of panic…paralysis…a prickle of sweat. Sound familiar? So I thought I’d share the practical tricks I use to write email marketing copy. Not so much the intricacies of word choice or paragraph structure, but the process of actually getting the job done and done well. Your tips are also welcome!
1. Define the recipient
The writing process needs a framework to proceed in: a real or implicit briefing…the whos, whats and whys of the task. Who will get this email and in what context? Have they undertaken some specific action (like registered for an event)? When will they get the email?
How does this email fit, conceptually and in terms of timing, with other emails or related marketing campaigns…
Bigger text ads, separate device bids, responsive display ads and new ads on Google Maps
As expected, there were plenty of big announcements at the 2016 Google Performance Summit. AdWords was the star of this year’s show and Google revealed a string of big changes coming soon to the platform. There’s a clear push towards mobile with these upcoming features and plenty of reason to be excited. Here’s a quick run through of the biggest headlines to come out of the Google Summit.
1. Text ads are about to get a whole lot bigger
The most intriguing announcement from Google is that text ads are going to be bigger than ever. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will allow you to write two headlines of up to 30 characters, instead of the current single headline and 25-character limit. You’ll also have up to 80 characters for the newly extended description block, up from two 35-character…
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20 Jun 2016
How to best use punctuation in email marketing campaigns
Is the smartphone really killing off the period as a punctuation mark for texters? A recent story in the Washington Post says it is.
Where the full stop once marked the end of a sentence, the simple line break now claims that role in texting. The stop itself has evolved into a shorthand symbol that charges an otherwise innocuous sentence with deeper meaning, such as anger. It's less obvious than emoji and takes fewer taps on the keyboard.
That made us think (because we think about email all the time) about subject lines with stops at the end. Do they help or hurt opens, clicks and deliverability? And what about other punctuation marks? Do question marks really drive more traffic? And what’s the deal with exclamation marks?
To get some definitive answers, we turned to Touchstone's universe of virtual subscribers to see what impact punctuation…
You can do a lot more with your email address list than just email them
Depending on the size of the business you work for, you might have an email list of hundreds, thousands or millions. You already know your email list is valuable because email marketing is one of the most effective channels in terms of ROI. But an email list isn't just for emailing. You can use it for all kinds of clever targeting techniques, to advertise to your customers at the exact moment they may be considering a purchase. Here are some of the options for utilising your email list for targeting ad placement:
Facebook Custom Audiences
Marketers can match their email addresses with those of Facebook and display ads in the main feed and right rail. This is by far the most mature offering, and many companies are doing it already. Facebook will also generate 'look-a-like' audiences for you…
What marketers can learn from Wendy's Vs Burger King, Dunkin Vs Starbucks and General Motors Vs Ford
Coke Vs. Pepsi, Wendy’s Vs. Burger King, Mac Vs. PC… What do these things have in common? They are examples of some intense rivalries between powerful brands. As long as advertising has existed, companies have engaged in fierce competition with one another, and they haven’t shied away from calling one another out. There are examples of this in print advertising, and television and radio commercials. Today, the fight has been taken to social media where brands are duking it out on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Keep reading to take a look at some of the most intensive advertising wars over the past decade or so, and get some insights into what marketing professionals can learn these intense rivalries.
Starbucks, McDonald's…
