“Soldier-Focused” Messaging – We’ve spent some time highlighting the value of Custom-Focused Messaging, but what about the military? Perhaps the best way to tap into the hearts and minds of future soldiers is to simply ask them what messaging works for them and how they would improve it. In Sacramento, local recruiters host focus group-style forums called “Future Soldier Panels” to get feedback on their marketing approach, to make sure it resonates with the target audience.

Relevance by Generation – A look at the U.S. Army messaging over the years and you can see how it’s evolved to remain relevant to the needs and emotions of each generation targeted. “Uncle Sam Wants You” was perfect for The Greatest Generation, who are comfortable with authority, taking orders, and believed it was both a privilege and responsibility to serve others. “Be All That You Can Be” targeted today’s Baby Boomer generation, and could still serve as a mantra for their core beliefs and desire for personal success and excellence. Transition to the Gen X messaging where the people are more self-reliant and independent and you can see how “Army of One” would be appealing. Today’s young people (Generation Y) ask more questions and need to understand the reason behind the task. They also tend to have close relationships with their parents. So, for the first time ever, the Army’s messaging has shifted away from the individual to include the influencers with “You Made them Strong… We’ll make them Army Strong.” It’s all about relevance – connecting on a personal level in a meaningful way with their audience.

Social Media – Last week the Air Force released an updated guide for social media use. Created for use by Airmen and their families, the resource offers some valuable guidelines and recommendations that can be used to inspire and enhance private-sector social media policies as well. The 22-page guide, entitled “Navigating the Social Network: The Air Force Guide to Effective Social Media,” is available as a free download. It’s good stuff, and if you don’t currently have a social media policy within your organization, the Air Force approach may be a good place to start.

Recently, Rev Media Marketing identified the U.S. Army as one of the best and most effective users of social media to get their message out to the right demographic. In the article, they explained, “Unlike many private companies, the Army makes full use of a whole host of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo; Pinterest, Google+, Flickr and more. Not only does the Army have a presence on these sites, they regularly post meaningful and relevant content there as well. Granted, their messages are more or less themed toward self-promotion and recruitment, but that is their job after all.”

In my own research, I was impressed by how well the Army uses Pinterest to share its brand awareness, values and activities. You can check it out here: http://pinterest.com/usarmy. It includes pins on training, family, veterans, “chow” (patriotic recipes and care-package tips) and more.

Special thanks to all the veterans, and to all who serve in the United States Military – especially the hard-working marketing officers. Happy Memorial Day!

What has changed is our understanding of the ways (specifically the where’s) in which people are using their tablets. We have all struggled with the issue of how should we classify a tablet – as a mobile device like a smartphone, as an analog for a laptop experience, or as its own type of device? Without addressing that specifically, what is clear is that tablets get a lot of use in the home. A recent Viacom study found that US tablet owners use their devices in the home about 74% of the time.

The “why” is easy – the tablet is a media consumption device. Sure you can work on a spreadsheet or a few slides if you have to, and it’s great for emails in the airport, but primarily it’s designed to let you take in the most content possible – games, movies, news, music, photos, videos, tweets and status updates.

What makes the tablet so fit for consumption? Many things, but one of them is the browser itself and the ease of using it. This is why “couch commerce” cannot be ignored. It’s not the most popular tablet activity, but last holiday season, Black Friday generated almost 6.5 million page views from iPads alone, according to a Compuware study. The same study found that most top online retailers had no iPad-optimized site experience.

So last year I encouraged three questions to determine your need for a tablet strategy:

1. What does your site do or what products do you sell?
2. Is there an audience?
3. What is the current web experience like on a tablet device?

These are still a valid way to approach determining your need for a tablet strategy, but the answers have certainly changed a bit.

Clearly if you sell a media experience, tablet optimization is necessary. Period. Since we know couch commerce is here to stay and that the market is expected to continue growing rapidly, optimizing sites selling real goods also makes more sense than ever.

As for the audience, we know it’s there and can confidently assume it will continue to be. As before, let your site metrics be your guide, but if you haven’t looked at tablet use on your site lately, it’s time to do so. You may be surprised by the results.

And for your current web experience, if you haven’t evaluated it on an iPad or Android tablet, you need to. While experts may be able to recommend points of optimization that you don’t see right away, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a fancy analysis to be effective. Sit with an iPad and see what frustrates you. What could be tuned to make your site friendlier for media consumption (e.g. gesture controls on your photos)? Better yet – give an iPad to a couple friends who aren’t as familiar with your site and watch them. Let the couch be your usability lab.

How does this relate to preheaders? According to Email Design Review, depending on user settings, the preview text in the iOS mail window, customers can view up to the first 90 characters of email content, whereas subject lines are truncated at around 40 characters. This means that while a strong subject line is still effective, a more call-to-action oriented preheader is a key player in transitioning from preview pane to opens and clicks.

This information can be wonderfully helpful to consider when designing and writing messages, but this approach to preheaders can also help your desktop opens too. Sure, we all know about the Outlook preview pane, but webmail clients like Gmail also give readers a chance to preview what’s in their messages before they open.

Looking at a wide sampling of emails, however, it’s all too common to see “housekeeping” items displayed in the first 90 characters, such as “View on the Web” links and social media callouts. While some may argue that this is a perfectly acceptable way of doing things, a more actionable preheader gives readers far more incentive to open your email.

Think about your emails as a conversation – your subject line is the introduction, and the preheader segues into the main plot, which is the body of the message. Why get off topic with something like, “Trouble viewing this message?” Keep things moving toward customer action by using your preheaders to effectively bridge the gap between the subject line and the content of the email.

As a marketer, it’s important to figure out how to effectively manage the text that customers see when they view both their inboxes and their iPhones, and shed some light on the different requirements to consider when creating subject lines and preheaders.

While you’re focused on getting your next campaign out the door, Polly has been the recipient of a powerful marketing approach centered on her preferences, her likes, and her needs. While your marketing approach is being built off of campaign calendars for each separate channel, your evil competitor is stealing Polly’s heart (and more business) by focusing on the customer.

What’s a brand to do?

Polly was influenced by an automated series of messages presented across several digital channels and touchpoints. The cadence of messages was not so much that it felt “creepy” in any way. Instead, she felt that karmic coincidence of right message at right moment in the right location – highly targeted to what interests her most today (even this hour). What she saw on the website was in response to what she clicked in an email coordinated with her exposure to display advertising. And the email content could have even been triggered by a web search Polly did last Thursday.

Because the evil competitor includes a team of clever marketers, they had Polly’s information stored in a Universal Data Management system instead of trapped in separate channel-based systems. Polly’s behaviors, history, and online activity are now useable data points to leverage for dynamic campaign content including triggered messaging.

That means Polly’s interests in pretty blue things was captured and used to swiftly increase her conversion from browser to buyer.

The moral of the story: Your evil competitor really isn’t wicked; they just have wicked cool technology to support their approach. So should you.

This will tell you how many files were loaded, how long each one took, and the order in which they load. This will help you pinpoint the sources that are slowing your page load times.

YSlow is a tester built into Firebug. It will analyze your page and give it a grade based on industry standard practices. The first time you run this, you will get a bad grade, and all things may seem a bit overwhelming. Here are some areas to concentrate on:

• Make fewer HTTP requests: Try consolidating JavaScript and CSS files. The fewer requests, the faster the load time.
• Compress components with gzip: Most web servers can compress responses. This makes for smaller files, and smaller files load faster.
• Put JavaScript at bottom: If JavaScript is at the top of the page and takes a while to load, it halts everything below it until it finishes. Move it lower.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): If you web server is serving up dynamic web pages, it does a lot of work to do that (reading and setting cookies, etc.). Most web servers are set up to only allow two connections per client. So if you are serving static content (like images, CSS files, etc.) from the same place, this adds work and creates a bottleneck. By using a CDN, you can offload those requests, reducing the strain on you web servers. The static files will then load faster and your dynamic content loads faster, too. For more info on CDN, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network.

Step Two: Address – After finding the issues in your audit, this is where you actually pick which things to fix and then fix them. Some may be as simple as having IT enable features on your web server, but others can be more involved, such as publishing to a CDN. So choose your battles, and once your done…

Step 3: Repeat - Web load time optimization is not a “set it and forget it” thing. As your website changes and technologies change, there is always room for improvement. The best thing you can do is stay on top of it.

According to eMarketer: “Members of the ‘smartphone class’ stand apart from other Americans in the way they shop, communicate, consume media—even how they use their spare time. Its members define themselves by their connectedness and their sense of empowerment through unfettered access to real-time information.” The research firm estimates that nearly 3 in 5 consumers will have a smartphone by 2016. Additionally, eMarketer mentions that the “smartphone class” takes part in something we all probably do when we’re bored: turn to our mobile devices.

“Depending on their mood in the moment, gratification might mean completing a quick task or finding a fun distraction. For marketers, this rising content consumption means an increasing number of touchpoints where they can reach consumers,” according to the report.

One of those touchpoints could be in an mcommerce setting. IBM reports that purchases made from a mobile device account for 13% of online purchases, up from just 7% the previous year.

According to a recent article, “IBM adds that 17.1 percent of all sessions on retailer sites are now initiated on mobile devices, increasing from 6.1 percent in the first quarter of 2011.”

Internet Retailer reports that 12.5% of mobile users are will to share their location with retailers in order to receive special offers and coupons. Additionally, 33% of mobile users would like to receive coupons or special offers via SMS or through an app, and 21% of smartphone users said they would be interested in mobile advertising if it was offering a deal for a location near them.

And finally, Return Path reports that 88% of people check their email from a mobile device daily. Return Path also estimates that more people will be reading email on mobile rather than a desktop device by the end of 2012.

What other interesting mobile or digital marketing news have you come across recently?

Over the coming weeks we’ll be introducing you to different departments within Knotice. We’ve got our Professional Services Team, developers, Creative Services department, and more.

Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the ‘members’ of the Creative Services department. These team members are soft, fluffy and enjoy taking naps. Meet the stuffed animals of the Creative Services Department:

State of the Stuffed Animal Union: Mr. Speaker … The President of the Stuffed Animal Congress, Llama! We set this up at work. Llama is the president, Duck is the loud-mouth vice president since he can actually quack and the angry birds are the conservatives who don’t agree with anything President Llama says.

It’s a dangerous time to be a stuffed animal at work …

Mike brought in a Rubik’s cube at work to help when he suffers from designer’s block. It seems his elephant has figured out a side on his own … with no help from the idiots in the peanut gallery putting in their two cents. He’s a smart little guy.

An error page or a slow-loading page can feel like a locked door at the store. It can also feel like a long check-out line. With the web now being a sometimes a first, if not the only, exposure to your business, you want that impression to be easy and meet the average users’ expectations.

Nearly half of web users expect web pages to load in 2 seconds. Adding a second, making for 3-second page load can lead to 40% of users abandoning your site. Studies have also shown that an increase of one second in page load times can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.

Not too long ago the golden rule was 7 seconds. But that was in the time of dial-up internet and not-so-smart phones. Today, with cable modems and fiber optics in the home and 4G LTE on smart phones, people don’t want to wait. The 7 second rule is not even valid in the mobile world. Most people are more patient with their phones, but the abandonment rate still goes up the longer they wait.

Whether load times are affected by server load, poor coding, heavy pages, or anything else, the consumer does not care. Their loyalty and their attention stems from the snappy performance they expect of you website. In part two of this article, we will hit some high points on making your website perform at its best.

For more information on how load times can affect your user experience check out this info-graphic here.

Forrester previously has stated that a lack of messaging focus across channels can weaken a brand’s prominence in the mind of the consumer. Such weakness leads to less-than-ideal customer experiences. So even if your brand messages are sprinkled across disparate channels without consideration for relevance and needs of the customer, it’s never too late to connect the digital dots and get your approach on track.

As you’ll see in this independent (non-commissioned) case study, vacuum and cleaning product manufacturer Oreck generated 10 times more revenue on Oreck.com, decreased abandoned shopping carts and increased conversions by connecting the various digital touch points with a unified approach. A key component to their success was the use of Knotice’s Universal Profile Management System, which allowed Oreck to create a robust warehouse of customer profile data for use to inform more relevant messaging.

While it may seem daunting for marketers to abandon the old separate-channel siloed approach in favor of a more complete view of the customer, making the switch can yield impressive results, as Oreck has demonstrated.

Check out this brief interview with Tarik Dekkar, Head of Digital and CRM at Oreck, for an inside look at how they used Knotice’s on-demand platform, Concentri, to achieve success using customer data for advanced segmentation.

Again, to access the complete report, “Case Study: Oreck Improves Media Spend ROI By Taking A Unified View Of The Customer,” follow this link. And, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can achieve the kind of success Oreck has seen, just shoot us an email at info@knotice.com.

Check out some of the creative submissions below:

Here’s Kim and Matt from Professional Services with their literal interpretation of Cinco de Mayo.

Sarah and Micah showing some enthusiasm about today’s festivities.

Ok, so here’s one picture of the food.

The weather has certainly warmed up now that it’s May, and though it’s not Cinco de Mayo themed, here’s a shot of some of our developers sporting their new uniform: plaid shorts.

The Creative Department’s stuffed animals (more on that in a post next week) were looking forward to their Cinco de Mayo buffet feast…

But someone had to go and ruin it all ….
Good thing most of them are herbivores. The moral of the story: Never let the pig have at the buffet first.

Jeff bridges (what a doll!) is back in the saddle again, this time for the soon-to-be cult classic “Tequilla Mockingbird.”