Fresh Clicks: Marketing and Analytics Strategies

How I increased email subscribers by more than 300%

Lary Stucker — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:54:09 +0000

In marketing a lot of time and effort goes into the philosophy and science of targeting the proper markets, understanding your customers needs, and crafting a campaign that demonstrates your product as the superior solution to their problem. What if there was something you could do that would increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by over 300% but it had nothing to do with the actual campaign?

Reducing Friction

Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form; Anytime you ask people to do something you are creating a point of friction. Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing. It is easy to forget about friction but doing so may severely inhibit the success of your campaigns.

Now that I have you thinking about friction, let me show you what happens to your marketing efforts when you reduce it.

Old “friction” form

Old form

On our website we have a 30-day free trial download page and when people download the trial they have an option to add their email address.

Problems that caused friction:

Unnecessary instructions: There are four steps involved in downloading the free trial. We are telling the audience that the steps to downloading a free-trial are so complex that we had to give you instructions! That kind of complexity is surely going to cause friction
Wrong order: They came to the page in order to download a free trial, but instead we talk about their email address and ask for it first. The actual links to the free trial downloads are much lower on the page.
Email form field: We ask for an email address, but don’t say why. Sure we mention it way up at the top of the page, but they didn’t need to make a decision to give it until now.
Too many versions: You want someone to make the decision about which version they need after they have decided they want to download it. Showing all of those versions and (unnecessary system requirements) makes it look more complicated then it needs to be.
Special instructions: Install instructions do not belong in the download form. That information should be on the thank you page. Once someone has invested the time to actually download the free-trial.

New “reduced friction” form

New "reduced friction" form

Removed all of those unnecessary instructions.
Included a product picture and positioning message to remind them why they want to try out the software.
Added a drop-down input field with the most popular version preloaded so that most customers will not have to change version.
Email request is after the form free trial option and there is a clear benefit associated with providing their address.
Large “download now” button makes it easy to understand the purpose of the form.

After implementing these changes our average email subscriber rate jumped more than 300%!

Only part of your overall strategy

By now it should be apparent that reducing friction will go a long way in creating more successful marketing campaigns. But remember it is only part of the solution; You still need to create marketing programs to attract new customers.

As part of your high level marketing strategy, map out the entire path a person takes from first-contact (whether it is an ad, a trade show booth, search engine etc.) to successful conversion to paying customer. Now that you have identified all of the areas of friction, you can build a marketing program with the greatest chances of success.

Have you had personal experience optimizing the customer experience to reduce friction? Did this article convince you to make changes? If so I’d love to hear from you!

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How file permissions can protect your site from hackers

Lary Stucker — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 07:33:42 +0000

I put together a lot of marketing strategies that revolve around a corporate website or microsite as a destination for visitors. A lot of effort goes into creating and executing these strategies. So you can probably imagine the anxiety I went through when one of the sites I manage was hacked. I was on the phone with my hosting company, Rackspace Cloud and they walk me through the steps of cleaning out the injected data, getting the site back up and running and finding the vulnerabilities. I thought I had taken the proper steps to protect the site, but I was wrong and I want to share that information with you so that you can avoid that same mistake.

What areas of your site are vulnerable?

Forms/ input fields:

This is the most common source of an attack. Hackers use form fields as a way to inject malicious code into your site or databases in an attempt to gain control of, destroy or steal information. (Like customer credit cards)

FTP:

(File Transfer Protocol ) is how you transfer files and folders to your server. If hackers can find or guess your password they can have complete control of your servers.

Files and folders:

If a file or folder has the wrong permission settings a hacker can copy, overwrite, or delete it.

File Permissions: Thats how they got me

Without getting into the details, there was a single file with the wrong permissions. This file was found and rewritten so that it would inject other files with malicious code. That one file opened the entire site up to the hacker! I didn’t think it was an issue because this file was in a folder that wasn’t linked to anything on the public site, so I didn’t think anyone would ever know it was there. I couldn’t have been more wrong! Luckily, I was able to catch it earlier and the most damage it created was a small down time to the service.

What the heck is CHMOD?

CHMOD is a Unix/Linux shell command used to change permissions on files and is an abbreviation of “Change Mode”. The permissions say who can do what to the files and folders on your server. These permissions are usually represented by three numbers like (644) or (777). Each column represents the access level for a user. The first number shows the access level of the “owner” of the file, the next represents the “group” and the final column is “public”.

What the numbers mean:

7 = read, write, and execute
6 = read and write
5 = read and execute
4 = only read
1 = only execute
0 = no permissions

So a file with the last digit of “7″ means that anyone can read write or execute that file.

This is how I fixed it

Folders:

Since I don’t want anyone in the public to be able to add files to my directories I changed all of the folders to 755. The “owner” is the only one who is allowed to read, write and execute the directories, while the rest of the world is only allowed to read and execute those directories.

Files:

Since I don’t want anyone to be able to write to a file or execute it I am going to make sure all of the files have 644 as their file permissions. That means the owner can read and write but the public can only read. Since executable files like PHP are read into memory and then interpreted, they don’t need to have executable permissions.

What kind of measures have you implemented to safeguard your website?

Image by: Zach Klein

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Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking for Joomla 1.5

Lary Stucker — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:00:02 +0000

It has long been rumored that Google was going to start ranking pages based on page load time. Think about it, if your page takes longer to load then visitors won’t get to see as many pages. Less pages mean that Google doesn’t get to serve as many advertisements to those visitors and they end up making less revenue.

Google asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load the Google Analytics JavaScript, so its impact on the user experience is minimized. It also allows you to put your Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering. Visitors get to see your pages faster, and Google gets to serve more adds – everybody wins!

I put together a new Joomla 1.5 plugin so that you can easily add the new tracking code to your Joomla powered site.

Installation is easy:

Download the plg_FCGanalytics1.0.0.zip
From the Joomla administrator console go to Extensions/ Install
Under “Upload Package File” click “choose file” and browse to the file you just downloaded. Once you select it, click “Upload File & Install“
Once you see the “Success” message, go to Extensions/ plugin manager and click on the plugin named “FreshClicks Google Async Analytics”
Under the plugin paramaters add your Google Analytics UA Code (the code should look something like UA-123456-1), under Enabled choose “Yes” and then click “Save”

That’s it- You new site should now start reaping the benefits of Asynchronous Tracking!

If you find this code useful or have any questions, please comment below and make sure to vote for this plugin on Joomla!

Winning Strategies for Growing Your Email Subscriber Database

Lary Stucker — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:26:50 +0000

This article was guest written by Joel Book

One of the most valuable assets a company has is its database of email subscribers.

Just ask highly successful large companies like Papa John’s, Scotts, and Hitachi Data Systems as well as hundreds of small and mid-sized companies like CardsDirect, Aptera Software, and Powell’s Books. Each of these companies has the ability to deliver relevant and timely information and offers to their email subscribers – when they need to do so. By “owning their own communications channel,” these companies are not dependent on traditional print or broadcast media to attract customers or drive repeat sales. They have the advantage of choosing when, how and with whom they communicate.

Start With the “End” in Mind

According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research, titled Email Marketing Comes of Age, “Those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”

Clearly, email has proven its value for aiding the customer’s buying process and driving repeat sales. And in testing conducted by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email delivered the highest ROI of all direct response marketing methods tested.

So if your objective is to use email as the backbone of your company’s marketing, sales, and customer service operations, you need to invest in the right strategies and tactics to attract email subscribers.

Here are 3 subscriber acquisition strategies I recommend:

1. Search Engine Marketing. Usage of search engines like Google and Yahoo that make information on the Internet easier to find have revolutionized the way brands and companies “lead” customers to their websites. That’s why you should not overlook Paid Search as a tactic for attracting new email subscribers.

Chris Dawkins, founder and CEO of search engine optimization company Trace Media Marketing, had an excellent article in BtoB Online in July in which he discussed using PPC (Pay Per Click) or paid search in combination with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or natural search to attract visitors to your website or landing page. As Dawkins points out in his article, “testing various keywords and phrases with paid search can be beneficial to your SEO efforts. For example, you can figure out quickly which keywords convert to leads or sales.”

I like paid search because it allows marketers to attract the “right kind of customer” to their website. And once you get them to your site, you have a golden opportunity to invite them to become an email subscriber.

2. Social Forward. Social Forward is “new age word-of-mouth-marketing” and is fast becoming an incredibly effective technique for attracting new email subscribers. By embedding social media icons in the email content for top social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN, marketers can empower existing subscribers to share the email they receive with friends and colleagues with whom they are connected. And when the email is shared with a non-subscriber, they are invited to opt-in.

Social Forward provides two big benefits:

It allows recipients to share special offers, articles, and other content in the email. This type of word-of-mouth promotion is invaluable.
It enables companies to expand the distribution of the email campaign beyond current subscribers. This “multiplier effect” can be huge for driving brand awareness and sales.

One brand that uses Social Forward very effectively to expand their database of email subscribers is Dreamfields Pasta. In two years, the brand has built a database of 400,000 consumers and 18,000 healthcare professionals. Email and word-of-mouth-marketing have become the cornerstones of Dreamfields phenomenal success.

3. Mobile Opt-in. Smart phones have forever changed how marketers use text messaging as a direct response tactic to engage consumers and provide them an opportunity to subscribe to the company’s email communications, special offers, and customer service alerts.

For retailers like Pier 1, consumer packaged goods marketers like Scotts, restaurants like Taco John’s, and service providers like Expedia, text is fast becoming an ideal tactic for interacting with customers – regardless of whether they are in a store, at an event, or on foot. And that’s why it’s so smart to use text to make it easy for consumers to subscribe to your email communications. By inviting consumers to opt-in when they are most interested and engaged, marketers dramatically improve their chances of gaining new subscribers.

About Joel Book

Joel Book is Director of eMarketing Education for ExactTarget, the world’s leading provider of on-demand software for permission-based email and mobile marketing.

With more than 30 years of experience in database marketing, Joel combines proven strategies and tactics for customer development and retention with contemporary one-to-one marketing and social media technology to teach organizations how to attract new customers, aid the customer’s decision-making process, and drive repeat purchase.

In 2009, Book was voted one of the “50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management.”

When he’s not speaking or teaching, Joel shares his perspective on strategies and tactics for successful one-to-one marketing in his blog: Email Marketing by the Book

4 ways to use analytics to improve your email campaigns

Lary Stucker — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:20:26 +0000

ExactTarget just published my article, 4 ways to use analytics to improve your email campaigns on their email marketing blog. I am excited because this is my first article as a guest blogger.

Please go check it out and let me know what you think. You can post a comment to their blog, this site or just @ me on twitter, @LaryStucker

Tomorrow FreshClicks will be publishing, “Wining Strategies for Growing Your Email Subscriber Database“ by our first guest writer, Joel Book