Engagement

Company e-newsletters: Much ado about … what? (Part 2)

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research , , , , , ,

This post is a continuation of a topic I wrote about several days ago. That column focused on the (lack of) reader engagement with customer e-newsletters and what may be the root causes of it.

This follow-up post focuses on what marketers can do to improve their newsletters’ worth to readers. It boils down to addressing four main issues:

Too much e-newsletter content is “full of it” – People don’t want to read about how great the company is or other navel gazing-type content that’s completely company-focused.  Instead, offer soft-sell (or no-sell) content that’s truly of value.  Simply ask yourself, “If I weren’t an employee of this company, would I care at all about this topic?”  This exercise applies equally to B2B and B2C newsletters.

Tired writing – There’s nothing more tiresome than a newsletter article that’s filled with corporate-speak or comes across as a patchwork of language from multiple sources.  But this happens all too often.  Sometimes it’s because the writer is overworked and hasn’t had sufficient time to source the article and create a compelling narrative.  Perhaps the author is a non-writer.  Often, it’s simply that the people inside the company love how the copy reads – tin ear or not.  Regardless of the topic of your story, newsletter copy should have personality, and it needs to move.  Otherwise, it’s your reader who’s going to move on.

Gaining an audience – Too many newsletters are playing to an empty house, whether it’s because of an opt-in audience that doesn’t care about you anymore, or from a total lack of visibility in search results or on social media.  Build circulation through in-house databases, optimizing copy to draw in new readers via SEO, and promoting article content through social posts.  Again, these prescriptions work for both consumer and business marketing, although the individual tactics may differ somewhat.

Neglect – It happens way too often:  An e-newsletter initiative begins with great fanfare, but it doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear off.  What starts out as a bi-weekly turns into a monthly or a quarterly, with gaps in between.  Eventually the only thing “regular” about it is its irregularity.  It’s surprising how many corporate websites show links to archived newsletters all the way up to 2016 or 2017 — but then nothing more recent than that.  And we all know what that means …

Wrapping it all up, it’s worth asking this basic question every once in a while: “Is our newsletter any good?” The answer should be unmistakable — if you read your content with a completely open mind.

If you’re involved in your company’s e-newsletter initiatives, do you have any additional insights about what makes for a successful program? Please share them with other readers here.

 

What types of word terms perform best in social media?

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Words that sell in social mediaEver since the rise of social media platforms, marketers have wondered if the terms and phrases that generate the best response in direct marketing also perform as well in the social arena.

One reason why:  There have been plenty of experts emphasizing how consumers don’t wish to be “sold” in their social interactions, but instead prefer to develop a relationship of give-and-take with brands.

Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist at HubSpot
Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist at HubSpot

Now we have some empirical analysis to guide us, conducted by Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at SaaS inbound marketing firm HubSpot based on reviewing ~200,000 links containing tweets.

Mr. Zarrella found that the tweets that contain more verbs and adverbs experience higher clickthrough rates than noun- and adjective-heavy tweets.

Zarrella’s research also found that when social media posts ask for an explicit action on the part of the recipient, that tends to increase clicks and engagement.

For instance, retweets are three times more likely to happen when people are specifically requested to do so.

Interestingly, the most “retweetable” words in the HubSpot analysis turn out to be the same terms that do well in e-mail marketing and other forms of direct marketing:

  • You
  • Please
  • Post
  • Blog / Blog Post
  • Free
  • Media
  • Help
  • Great
  • How To
  • Top
  • Check Out

In a parallel research endeavor, a recent evaluation of blog posts by writer and software analytics specialist Iris Shoor reveals how much a post’s title impacts on the volume of “opens.”

In her analysis, Ms. Shoor studied posts on 100 separate blogs, using an evaluation technique that rank-sorted blog posts from the most read to the least shared.

What were the words that resulted in the most opens?  Shoor calls them the “blood in the water” terms:

  • bleeds leadsKill
  • Fear
  • Dark
  • Bleeding
  • War
  • Dead
  • Fantasy

Translation?  Negative terms are more powerful for shares than more ordinary terms (e.g., positive ones).

It’s very much like the old adage in the newspaper world:  “If it bleeds, it leads.”

That’s another takeaway from the most recent research:  What’s worked in the offline world over the years appears to be working very much the same way in the online space today.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

Right on Cue: More insights into e-mail engagement.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,
Groaning e-mail inboxes
According to Cue’s 2012 user statistics, on average, people receive more than six e-mail messages for every one that they send.

As if we needed any more proof that people are getting more and more e-mails — and reading fewer and fewer of them — along comes some aggregated data that confirm our beliefs.

Cue (formerly known as Greplin) is a mobile app for organizing and searching online data across a variety of functions such as e-mail, cloud storage and online calendars.

Because of the large number of people who use the app, Cue has amassed huge amount of data when it comes to knowing users’ online activities.

Earlier this month, Cue released some anonymized aggregate data gleaned from a cross-selection of app users. Some of the interesting findings from that study, which covered all of 2012, include these “factoids”:

  • Average number of e-mail words written per person: ~41,400
  • Average number of e-mail messages sent: ~870
  • Average number of e-mail messages received: ~5,600

With over six times the number of e-mail messages received compared to sent, it’s no wonder people are busily trashing e-mails right and left with nary a glimpse at them.

Not only that, users are becoming slower in responding to the e-mails that they do read. In 2012, the average length of time for response was ~2.5 days, compared to ~2.2 days in 2011.

But more than half of all e-mail responses happened within the first hour – and nearly 90% within 24 hours. This means that the other ones were responded to a really long time afterward in order to result in the 2.5-day average.

There were some other interesting tidbits Cue gleaned from its user analysis. For instance, “dogs” topped the list of most-mentioned animals; they were mentioned 38% of the time versus 32% for cats and just 19% for fish.

And in terms of swear words – what everyone wants to know even if they won’t admit it – the “S” word outscored the “F” word by ~43% to ~39%, with the “D” word bringing up the rear at just ~18%.

[Come to think of it, wouldn’t it have been more apropos if the “S” word was bringing up the rear?]

The Great Disappearing Attention Span

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

With the 2010 political season well upon us, think of this: During the famous Illinois senate election campaign of 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, each of the seven debates that were held lasted three or more hours. And they were well attended, with audiences paying rapt attention.

How quaint.

By comparison, it’s hard to imagine today’s public paying attention to a political candidate for more than 20 minutes. Charting the steady drop-off in viewership during the course of presidential State of the Union addresses proves the point.

In fact, Prof. Bradley Vander Zanden of the University of Tennessee maintains that the average attention span of an adult today is just that: 20 minutes.

And if you’re thinking that attention spans are getting shorter, you’re not wrong. Moreover, the Internet is contributing to this overall trend, because the average attention span online only is three to five minutes.

The phenomenon of multi-tasking is ubiquitous, with people surfing the Internet while watching television … cyber-chatting with friends while listening to music … checking e-mail inboxes while cooking a meal. Colleen Rush, an executive vice president at MTV Networks, reports, “Our research showed that people somehow managed to shoe-horn 31 hours of activity into a 24-hour day. That’s from being able to do two things at once.”

Researchers now think that technology is having subtle effects on the way our brains actually work. Nora Volkow, a leading brain scientist who is also director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (part of NIH), contends that digital stimulation is similar to our need for food: essential for our being but counterproductive in excess.

Volkow and others believe that our ability to focus is being undermined by information overload, much of it coming in short bursts. These bursts of information play to a primeval impulse to respond immediately. Neurologically, the stimulation provokes excitement in the form of a dopamine dosage that experts say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

I bet you can think of several of your business colleagues who exhibit just those sorts of traits.

In the same vein, heavy multitasking can actually make it more difficult to discern and shut out irrelevant information. More ominously, some experts maintain that the stimulative urges of multi-tasking actually lessen our ability to engage in deeper analytical thought and creative musing. Ouch.

Food for thought, indeed.

Novelty Reigns at Allure Bays (er … Microsoft)

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft Office 2010 logoMicrosoft SharePoint 2010 logoIn the drive to “engage” customers, some companies are going to pretty great lengths to try something new and novel.

Take Microsoft and its soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office® 2010 and SharePoint® 2010 versions. Burned by the negative customer reaction to some of its earlier introductions (Vista®, for example), the company is trying some new tactics this time around.

Will they succeed? You be the judge.

You can start by visiting www.allurebays.com. This is a “pretend” site put up by Microsoft’s direct marketing agency-of-record (Wunderman), and attempts to generate awareness for the new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 versions without ever mentioning the products by name.

“Allure Bays Corporation” is a fictional company whose name is a riff on the Internet meme all your base are belong to us from an erroneous English translation in a Japanese video game that spread throughout the web in the early 2000s. The bogus site offers infomercial-type videos and other content. Special hidden clues are peppered throughout the site, with content that only alludes to the Office and SharePoint products and their feature/benefits.

What’s going on here? Jerry Hayek, a Microsoft marketing group manager, reported that the company wishes to reach an audience of developers that he characterizes as “jaded”: “It’s a fairly jaded audience. There are a lot of companies that want to talk to them,” he said.

In order to spark visitor engagement, a leaderboard on the “Allure Bays” web site allows registered users to compete for the honor of finding all of the 45 hidden clues on the site. So far, the site has attracted ~25,000 registered users.

“When we look at the developer audience, getting an engagement of 150,000 to 200,000 (spread across several videos) … is a win,” Hayek noted.

What’s the reaction of visitors? If the comments left by viewers of the “Allure Bays” video channel on YouTube are any gauge, it’s mixture of criticism and confusion. To wit:

 “This is one big, expensive, utterly failed attempt of Microsoft to go viral. Please thumbs-down this video.”

 “AYBABTU is a cornerstone of Internet culture. Microsoft appropriating it to hawk the newest version of their bloated Office Suite is loathsome. Anyone up-voting any of these videos should have their Internet license revoked.”

 “I don’t get it … is it supposed to be funny?! Or what the h*ll is going on here?”

“It could be the new TV show like Lost or Fringe or Fantasy Island 2?”

 “WTF.”

Sheri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research who covers Microsoft, reported that she found the “Allure Bays” site confusing. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.”

In the end, whether or not this initiative will be declared a success depends on how the folks at Wunderman and Microsoft view the results in terms of before/after awareness, audience engagement, and positive product perception.

But the early indicators don’t look all that promising.