Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I’ve really gone more towards twitter than blogging these days – for whatever reason, the ability to sort and then share lots of great content is just really appealing to me right now, much more so than blogging. Note that you can follow me on Twitter here: Healy Jones on Twitter.

So I thought I’d share some of my most retweeted and/or clicked tweets. These tweets have action oriented marketing tips in them:

Great email marketing tips

I’m way overdue writing up a blog post on some of the great things I’ve learned about email marketing, drip marketing and using emails to survey users for marketing and product purposes. But here are the email marketing tweets my follower really liked.

• Good example targeted email: RT @SourceLink: 4 Considerations for Email Marketing Done Right http://buff.ly/10kTHUp
• RT @responsewise1: 6 Obvious Email Marketing Mistakes To Avoid! http://buff.ly/15FykWN

Mobile Marketing

I continue to be fascinated with marketing mobile apps, and trying to understand how visitors and users intact with mobile apps and web sites.

• Study suggests that non-mobile optimized sites are a major cause of lower mobile vs tablet ecommerce: http://buff.ly/19oK24k via @mediapost
  
• ’12 digital ad unit performance: 0.14% rich media; 0.15% mobile; 0.62% invideo http://buff.ly/14caLRa via @pointroll http://buff.ly/10y8b7C

SEO

And I’m super overdue writing up a piece on how to win when you’ve got a huge stash of great content ready to be revealed to Google. Here are my most clicked tweets on search engine optimization:

• Pretty fun, what does google show for a single letter search? RT @BestRank: #SEO in its smallest form http://buff.ly/10N4J9p
  
• Some good slides in here: Mastering the Ins and Outs of SEO & CRO by @HubSpot on @slideshare http://buff.ly/13dsAja

Boundless is looking for on campus marketing managers. These are positions for undergraduate students who want to get marketing and management experience while they are in school. We are looking at many, many campuses across the country, and there is a good chance that your university is one of them. You can visit Boundless’s On Campus Marketing Program to apply for one of these jobs.

We need you to:

• Hire and manage hourly reps to execute on-campus marketing strategies,
• Approach classes, clubs and events to spread the word about Boundless,
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to acquire new users.
• The role is fun, fast-paced and varied: you should laugh in the face of adversity & show us how you can dominate your campus!

Requirements
You should be:

• Involved on-campus & extremely outgoing,
• Exude energy, fun & a passion for ‘getting stuff done’,
• A Sophomore, Junior or Senior, please!
• Prior marketing & management experience is a plus.

One of the big perks of my new marketing position with Boundless is that I get to work with amazing undergraduate students across the nation. These students are charged with letting people on their campuses know about Boundless and free textbooks. We recently had a great on campus competition, where we motivated our on campus student managers to hit aggressive sign up goals – and a lot of them really did an amazing job! Below is a cool post on the “campus battle” with some great pictures of the action.

http://storify.com/GoBoundless/how-campus-battle-started-a-textbook-revolution

I came across some great tips on crafting the best email subject lines on the Litmus blog here. Of course, testing testing testing is the best way to get good results with any email campaign, but starting with these ideas is a good way to begin the tests from a good place.

And I’m always struggling with subject line length, and found the open rate vs. email subject line length to be cool:

“Subject line lengths and their corresponding open and click rates:

• 4–15 characters: 15.2% open; 3.1% click
• 16–27 characters: 11.6% open; 3.8% click
• 28–39 characters: 12.2% open; 4% click
• 40–50 characters: 11.9% open; 2.8% click
• 51+ characters: 10.4% open; 1.8% click”

Lots of good content all of a sudden on both mobile and online marketing. Here are some good ones:

• Triggered emails have HUGE open and click throughs: Online Media Daily reports on a study that shows that triggered emails (emails that are sent when a user takes a specific action, such as abandons a shopping cart, have a much higher click through than ordinary marketing emails.”Triggered open rates performed at 75.1% higher”
• I recently posted about email marketing subject line performance. Here are the subject lines email marketers should avoid, and which ones drive good open rates.
• The best email marketing frequency depends on your industry & users, but in general the more you can do the better.
• Yup, people are really opening emails on mobile devices these days; Returnpath “reports that mobile open share has increased 300% since 2010, and shows no sign of slowing, with four out of 10 emails sent being read on a mobile device.” Read more.
• “The iPhone and Android smartphones remain the most popular smartphone platforms for messaging. iOS users account for more than half of those opting into MMS and text-messaging campaigns, compared to 34% coming through Android phones. Those levels are up from 23.6%, and 16%, respectively, in April. BlackBerry accounted for 7% of opt-in messaging.” Read more.

A company called Knotice is reporting that, during the time around the Thanksgiving holiday, 45% of emails sent by retailers were opened on MOBILE DEVICES!

Yup, my two of my favorite marketing channels, mobile and email, are getting closer and closer…

Check out this great slideshow on how b2c and b2b marketers view content marketing. There is a lot on social media marketing, which makes sense, but also talks a little bit about budget, etc.

A higher level summary is that b2c marketers who get a good return on content marketing

• Spend a more money on content marketing (makes sense if you are getting a positive roi)
• Distribute more content on more social networks in more ways
• Tailor content more frequently
• Feel good that they are producing engaging content

I came across a very interesting study showing email effectiveness, both by open rate and click through rate, by email subject line. Obviously I experiment a lot with email performance, varying subject line, content, design, etc. But it’s great to see data aggregated across a large number of campaigns.

The study was done by Adestra and is available here. Based on billions of sent messages from b2b companies, the looks at performance of different subject lines. I’m just going to quote from solid Marketingchart write up on the study, as it is very interesting data (the following is a direct quote):

• Currency symbols: Subject lines containing the £ symbol had a far better-than-average (57.8%) click-to-open rate. Those with $ signs scored above-average in opens (15.7%) and clicks (14.7%), but slightly below-average in click-to-opens (-0.8%). Subject lines containing the € symbol were above-average in opens (2.9%) but below-average in clicks (-8.2%) and click-to-opens (-10.8%). Of course, targeting has a big effect on this – as some symbols may be irrelevant to the recipient.
• Discount terms: These generally performed below-average. “Sale” was the outlier, above-average in opens (14.4%), clicks (76.5%), and click-to-opens (54.3%). Others such as “% off,” “discount,” “free,” “half price,” “save,” “voucher,” “early bird,” and “2 for 1″ all came in below-average in all 3 metrics, save for “voucher,” which had above-average opens (6.5%). “Early bird” was the worst performer in terms of clicks (-71.6%) and click-to-opens (-67.6%).
• News terms: These had better success than discount terms. “News” (16.2%), “update” (4.9%), “breaking” (33.5%), “alert” (25.9%), and “bulletin” (12.5%) all saw better-than-average click-to-open rates (as well as clicks and opens), with “newsletter” being the only term to perform below-average in each metric. “Alert” saw the best differential for clicks (78.3%), while “news” did best for opens (30.9%).
• Content terms: There were more discrepancies in this theme. “Issue” (8.5%) and “top stories” (5.9%) were the only to perform above-average in click-to-opens, although the latter saw slightly below-average open and click rates. “Forecast,” “report,” “whitepaper,” and “download” all saw below-average performance in each of the 3 metrics. “Research,” “interview,” and “video” scored above-average for opens, but below-average for clicks and click-to-opens.
• Benefit terms: “Latest” was the only to see above-average clicks (8.8%) and click-to-opens (9%), while “special,” “exclusive,” and “innovate,” while performing about average in opens, fared far more poorly in clicks and click-to-opens.
• Event terms: Each of these terms performed below-average in opens, clicks, and click-to-opens. The terms examined were: “exhibition,” “conference,” “webinar,” “seminar,” “training,” “expo,” “event,” “register,” and “registration.” The worst offender for click-to-opens was “webinar” (-63.5%).
• Multichannel terms: Facebook (21.6%) and Pinterest (16.4%) were the only terms to score above-average in clicks and click-to-opens, though both showed below-average performance in opens. On the flip side, “app” and “iPad” were above-average in opens, and below-average in clicks and click-to-opens. Both “Twitter” and “LinkedIn” were below-average in all 3 metrics.

Some of the take aways are likely to be correct for many email marketers, regardless of industry. The low performance of words like “webinar” and discount terms is probably something most marketers will see with their email campaigns. But it’s pretty hard to say that currency symbols will perform for everyone.

I guess the usual summary is that it makes sense to aggressively test all of this!

We had a fun recently with a video marketing effort, putting on a “webinar” on document backup that was taken over by Mayan doomsdayers. It’s pretty funny, you can read it below and see me attempting to be a comedic actor.

Webinar Taken Over By Mayan Apocalypse Believers

November 26th, 2012 by Healy Jones