People

• In Case You Missed It: "Power of eMarketing Conference" Recap

  June 30, 2011

  Sean Shoffstall, VP Innovation and Technology

  Did you catch the Power of eMarketing Conference in San Francisco?

  On April 19 and 20, I had the privilege of speaking on three panels at the conference. Naturally, social media and SEO were the hot topics of the day. But the conversation also trended toward lead nurturing and how to drive conversions from your social conversations.

  Here are a few quick thoughts on the three panels I participated in.

  Don’t Stop at CAN-SPAM Compliance
  On the morning of April 19, I was on a panel with a Director of Compliance for a large corporation. The conversation focused on best practices in subject lines and email formatting, and how they apply to spam traps. These three ideas really resonated with the audience:

  1. CAN-SPAM compliance is the bare minimum. If you want to avoid spam filters and get your message delivered, you need to go much further.
  2. Keep subject lines short and sweet, yet descriptive and honest. Remember that if your subject line is longer than, say, 70 characters, it will only be partially visible in a preview pane or mobile device.
  3. Image-only emails not only provide a bad user experience (most of your clients probably set “images off” as a default), but are also a spam filter trigger.

  
   “You Can’t Handle the Truth” About Email Content
  For my second session on April 19, I shared the stage with Loren T. McDonald from Silverpop. The conversation was much more detailed. In fact, I felt like we were two old war buddies sitting up on stage reminiscing about battle scars and answering questions. We covered deliverability, content creation and relevancy, frequency, and, of course, CAN-SPAM.

  We even had a “You can’t handle the truth!” moment when an audience member complained that he didn’t have any content. We spent the next 5 minutes covering all the different ways you can generate content.

  If you face a similar problem, look at these simple facts:

  1. If you sell products or services, you have content. Go to your people who know the product best. Interview them and create a top 10 list.
  2. If you have customers, you have content. See point #1.
  3. You can repurpose existing content to create new content. If you’ve captured a video, do a write-up about it for your newsletter. If you’ve published a popular blog post, make a web clip summarizing the top points. If your CEO is giving a presentation, have him or her write an article about the subject.

  
  Protecting Your Online Reputation
  Our session on email and branding covered everything from tone and voice to email and newsletter design. Across the board, everyone agreed that having a consistent tone and communicating and fulfilling on your customer’s expectations is key. There was some disagreement about using comical versus professional tone, and about how often to send communications. But much of that hinges on whether you’re writing B2B or B2C emails.

  Here are some of the high points, which may seem obvious but are easy to overlook:

  1. Naming your constant communications helps boost deliverability and open rates. So, name your newsletters, webcast series, and any regular postings (especially your blog).
  2. The fastest way to lose the branding battle is to do a bait and switch. Be consistent, and deliver what you promised.
  3. Protect your online reputation. Don’t spam, don’t incite flame wars, and keep the conversation on topic.

   If you were at the Power of eMarketing Conference, I’m glad you could join us.

  If not, there will be another conference coming up in October in Rhode Island. Ozone Online’s Joel Lockwood and I plan to participate. It’s always good to get out of our bubble and swap best practices with others who are in the trenches.

  See you there?

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  Sean Shoffstall, VP of Innovation and Technology Social media, search and metrics are the driving force behind today's online marketing. Sean specializes in driving the best results for clients in all aspects of their business. He gives them a solid platform to build key learnings in all online media through proven metrics and testing strategies, and by leveraging years of best practice learnings from the top companies online. Email Sean.

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• Business Speak for Designers

  February 23, 2011

  Tony Molinero, Art Director

  We designers spend years perfecting our craft and learning how to come up with elegant solutions to creative challenges. We describe our creations using words like aesthetic, gestalt, visual flow, and brand identity.

  Do the suit-wearing people who employ us understand our jargon? Many of them understand our words, if not the concepts behind them. But do we understand the jargon of The Suits? As professionals trained in facilitating communication, we certainly ought to.

  Now, if you feel the least bit icky about memorizing business acronyms and marketing buzzwords, remember this: when you learn how to talk the talk, you’ll be able to sell your designs much more effectively, thus expanding your creative freedom. The Suits will trust you more. They’ll think you’re a superstar if you can tie your design choices to better business performance.

  And you may even be able to reason with that marketing manager who insists you use their favorite color instead of the approved corporate colors.

  Sound like a deal? Let’s look at some common business acronyms and analyze what they mean for designers.

  RFP (Request for Proposal) – A document put out by a client who needs work done. The RFP essentially tells designers, “Show me what you’ve got.” In response, you’ll want to submit a proposal that makes it clear you can do exactly what they’re looking for. Ideally, you’ll include a price quote that’s cheaper than your competition, but not so low that you end up looking like a rookie.

  SOW (Statement of Work) – A contract with the client that explicitly states important project details, such as schedule, project scope, deliverables, and payment schedule. Why bother with a SOW? For one thing, it protects you when a client starts asking for additional deliverables in the middle of a project. By gently yet firmly pointing to the original SOW, you can make it clear that more deliverables will require more time and more money.

  ROI (Return on Investment) – The value a client receives for spending their money. Depending on the type of project, this may be expressed in terms of revenue, website traffic, publicity, or sales leads. ROI measurements give clients a way to justify their budget and feel safer about spending cash. (Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tie ROI back to specific design decisions.)

  SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – A form of advertising that seeks to attract website visitors from search sites (Google is the biggest player). Marketers love SEM because it delivers an easily trackable ROI that’s often directly proportionate to how much they spend. You’ll usually hear about SEM when you design landing pages.

  PPC (Pay per click) – The pricing structure used to buy ad placement on a website. The client only pays when a user clicks on their ad or banner – rather than paying for every “impression,” or appearance of their ad on a website. For designers, the upside to PPC banners is that they need to be visually enticing. The downside is that clients often want you to include huge, ugly buttons.

  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The art of making a website appear as a top result from keyword searches on Google (or any other search engine). Clients who are heavily into SEO will want all the words in your web designs to be HTML text instead of images. They’ll also want you to include a lot of copy in the design.

  CTA (Call to Action) – The link or button that urges the reader to click through to the next page. The CTA is often some variation of a big, red, shiny button that says CLICK HERE.

  KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – Any really important metric that determines how successful a business is. Typical KPIs include the total number of sales or how many people open an email. Most design projects are intended to improve one or more KPI. The more you can move those numbers, the more they’ll love you.

  CMS (Content Management System) – Any system, such as WordPress, in which web pages are created in two parts, with the layout structure handled separately from words and pictures. Most clients love using a CMS because they can update their website without going back to the designer. A CMS also enables you to serve up one website in several different languages, rather than creating several language-specific sites.

  You’ll probably hear hundreds of other acronyms tossed around in meetings, but learning the ones on this list will give you an edge in communicating your designs. Once you add this business speak to your design arsenal, perhaps The Suits will accept you as one of their own (but with better fashion sense).

  What have I missed? Do you have any business speak that you’ve translated to Designer? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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  Tony Molinero, Senior Art Director Coming from the burbs of the Windy City, Tony made his way to San Francisco in 1995 after graduating from University of Illinois with a BFA in Graphic Design. He has worked on projects ranging from packaging to signage systems to posters and marketing collateral. At the start of the new millennia, he jumped in to the world of web design, e-commerce, banners, email campaigns, site architecture and design. Email Tony.

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