Usability Key to E-commerce Success - eMarketer http://ping.fm/k2vbY

auto-responder campaigns - effective or irritating?

I've been learning about "auto-responder" campaigns as a way to make money online. A lot of the web-sales gurus use them. (People like Marlon Sanders, Sean D'Souza, Perry Marshall, Joe Vitale -- all of whom doubtless have much expertise one can learn from.) You sign up for a newsletter or free article download, and then they bombard you with offers (including other free ones) daily ever after.

I'm sure this does generate sales, but surely I'm not alone in finding them irritating and quickly unsubscribing or blocking them. Would it not be more effective (and certainly less irritating) to send a weekly email instead of a daily one?

I suppose it depends on your target market. I want to come across as professional and appeal to business people. Perhaps these daily types are really going after individuals and micro-businesses chasing dreams of wealth.

A good (& not so good) way to deal with low e-newsletter read rates

Years ago I subscribed to the McKinsey Quarterly newsletter and to the Harvard Business Review newsletter. The HBR I find consistently interesting. McKinsey's, unfortunately, tended to give you little beyond headlines, and expect you to pay for the real content. To be fair, this may have changed -- I haven't looked at it in quite a while. I simply rerouted their newsletter to my spam folder. (Sorry McKinsey!)

Today, I got an e-mail from McKinsey titled "Personalize your quarterly e-mail subscriptions" and the part I could read in the preview said "Help us send you the right e-mail." This caught my eye. It made me wonder if maybe there was better content and I just wasn't getting it. Potential to re-activate me. Well done!

Unfortunately, the follow-through was not as well done. I clicked the link to go check out my options, and got to this page:

(Not sure how readable the screencap is. It says "Sorry! This page is for registered members only" followed by login and registration instructions.) Now if someone has been inactive for quite a while, what are the odds of them remembering their login information? I sure didn't. If they knew my e-mail address to send me the e-mail in the first place, then I know it is possible for them to have taken me right into the system from the e-mail link, so I wouldn't have to go through the hassle of trying to remember and use my password.

Digg users vote on ads; great way to get them to pay attention to the ads! Clever! http://tinyurl.com/advoting

Look at these cleverly designed logos! http://ping.fm/x04SG

Is blogging dead?

In this era of social networking, do blogs still have value? I wonder how many people/companies really have the resources to devote to developing separate content for:
- blog posts
- linked in posts
- twitter posts
- facebook posts
- newsletters
etc.

So if you are re-using the same content, why would you expect fans to sign up for your newsletter and your blog? Or for each of your social marketing accounts? I accept that Twitter can usefully point people to a spot where you can elaborate on your thoughts, but is the point of maintaining all of the others simply to give people a choice of how they want to consume the material?

I wonder how many really do post largely separate and distinct content in each venue. Thoughts, anyone?

Google side-wiki

Here is a useful article that explains how you can "claim" your website's sidewiki. If you haven't heard about it yet, Google's new browser gives users the ability to have a panel running beside every website they visit, and in that side panel they can make comments on the site and see any comments made by others. If you "claim" your site, you get to have an introductory blurb at the top of the sidewiki, and your comments will rise to the top.

The sidewiki has a few important implications for website owners:
1. You have no control over what people write in there, so you must monitor it closely and be prepared to respond.
2. It may affect how you want to layout your website, as it will now take a considerable chunk of screen real-estate.
3. It does provide another opportunity to encourage people to sign up or communicate with you directly.

It will be interesting to see how it evolves, and, in particular, how Google avoids it becoming clogged with spam.

Interesting PhD thesis on information overload. I've posted some excerpts at www.temafrank.com.

Strategies for dealing with information overload

Information junkie that I am, one of my never-ending challenges is dealing with the tsunami of information crashing down on my head every day. It is partly my fault: I know I sign up for too many newsletters and too many feeds. But each of them gave me something of value that inspired me to sign up, and you never know from which and when you'll get a new gem.

I've read and implemented many of the ideas about taming e-mail overload (e.g. only check it a couple of times a day, use meaningful subject lines, etc.) but there's far more than e-mail at issue now. Even using tools such as popurls, customized iGoogle home pages, and other types of feeds, I find that I don't even have time to read all the subject lines, let alone deal with Twitter, Linked In and other sources that keep feeding me with more links to follow.

I've just finished reading a PhD thesis by L. Becker (citation below) on the topic. She makes the point that organizations need to rethink some of their processes to deal with information overload. One particularly strong point she makes is that we've overdone the shift away from administrative assistants, with the result that managers now spend way too much time doing tasks that could and should be done by admin staff. Just because a manager can do something, doesn't mean that he or she should. Does it really make sense to have someone earning $50/hr doing a job that could be done by someone at $15/hr?

Some of her other recommendations include:

- evaluate software products for ease of use before imposing them on staff

- "use extreme caution when implementing several new software products that will impact a single user group."

- consider whether the difficulty getting software products to work together will end up making tasks more complex rather than simpler. Even though a piece of software may make a sub-task simpler, if it has to be incorporated into other systems to complete the entire task, the time needed to do that can swamp the benefit.

- "Limit the number of organizational priorities" and "avoid placing a sense of urgency on all priorities".

- When setting priorities consider "organizational capacity (intellectual bandwith" to implement the priorities.

I'd love to hear your ideas about other ways to combat information overload while still staying on top of all the important news. And for how we can convince employers about the need to rethink their systems.



_____________
Becker, L.. The impact of organizational information overload on leaders: Making knowledge work productive in the 21st century. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Idaho, United States -- Idaho. Retrieved September 29, 2009, from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text.(Publication No. AAT 3363308).

Be honest with your vendor

Good article about how being open and honest with your vendors will get you better results.

Underappreciated technology

If you haven't seen it, this is a delightful interview clip about how we don't appreciate the wonderous technology all around us.

Google ads

I decided to start experimenting with Google Adsense. So far, the ads it has served on this blog do not seem very relevant. If that is the best it can do, I'll remove them.

Problems with video marketing

I got this email today from one of the lists I subscribe to:

" How to lose a customer fast
I've got a new VIDEO RAMBLING on my blog. It's less than six minutes long, but contains a very important marketing lesson.

Watch my latest video by clicking the link below:
[followed by the link and the author's name]"

I get that not everybody likes to read, and maybe this is just a generational thing, but frankly, I'd rather spend 60 seconds skimming for the "very important marketing lesson" than 6 minutes of listening to a "video rambling". And if I work in a cubicle, I sure don't want to inflict it on my neighbours, who might feel that I"m wasting company time watching videos.

Video is now so cheap and easy to do that you can also easily kill your credibility by doing it wrong. For example, I watched a video by a supposed marketing expert last night. It was clearly shot in his living room (complete with the false attachment of the hanging lamp partially obscured by his head), he looked younger than I would have imagined, and was sloppily dressed. Not exactly an image of authority.

How teens read web pages

I recently did some informal usability testing of a website that is aimed (in part) at tweens and teens. The testers were in the 13 - 14 age group. Small sample, so it may not be representative, but I was surprised and interested to see that:

* They read pages completely differently from adults: They totally ignored the navigation links; instead they jumped into the body of the page, looking for big headers and/or clickable links;

* The site aims to get kids to do some fund-raising. They had no interest in reading why they might want to do this; rather they were impatient to find out how. This could be largely because of the artifical testing situation, although it is unlikely that kids would get to the site without having been told about it by someone else, which means they likely would already have been "prequalified" and not need the sales pitch;

* They wanted photos of "real kids", not stock photos (no matter how attractive the teens in the stock images)

What has your experience been with sites aimed at this age group?

Sears, where are you?

A week has gone by since Sears said a tech would call. No word from them. I've given up and sent a letter. We'll see if that gets a reply. I'll keep you posted.

Vadim Kibardim: A designer with lots of interesting ideas http://ping.fm/qR9mP