MarketingXD - Digital Marketing

How digital marketing and marketing technology really works By Pete (pictured) & Mike Austin: 10 years in email marketing; last start-up acquired by emailvision.com.

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Birthday Emails could land you in court

Everyone likes Birthday emails. You collect each customers' date of birth, then send marketing emails to them or their friends just before each birthday, to wish them a happy birthday and make more sales.

So what's the problem? A little thing called COPPA:

the COPPA Rule came into effect in 1998 when [the US] Congress first passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The Rule requires that operators of websites or online services directed to or knowingly used by children under the age of 13 years follow a number of special steps aimed at protecting children’s privacy, specifically around how children’s “personal information” (name, address, email, etc.) is handled ... Some scholars argue, for instance, that the Rule has had a number of unintended consequences, including closing off vast swaths of the Internet from younger children, as banning users under the age of 13 can be perceived as easier and more cost effective than attempting to tackle COPPA compliance

Revisiting the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by Sara M. Grimes, PhD - The Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Do you really want to get involved in more compliance work than you need? Then make sure you never collect anyone's date of birth, even if that means you don't send birthday emails.

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ROI of Birthday Marketing Campaigns

Before you embark on a birthday email marketing campaign, think about the ROI and in particular the design work.

You're only going to be able to use it 1x per person per year.

This compares very badly with a typical weekly newsletter-style campaign that you can use 52x per person per year, with minimal changes - a *lot* more marketing for a very similar investment

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Valuing Startups

This is just a "bit of fun", but I've been wondering about how you value small, rapidly-growing, hitech startups.

Any valuation would have to depend on the startup surviving, because technology has no value without the people to implement it. And, while larger companies are valued at 2x income, accounting for this too strictly seems unfair for a company with few customers, at the very start of its growth phase.

But I think I have a method. Here's an example:

A new startup is getting regular orders, on average one per working day, each of which will earn £100 per month in license income.

I know, from my previous companies, that the customers will stay for 3 years on average

So each day's new orders are really worth £3,600.

Each year's new orders are really worth £900,000 (assuming 250 working days per year)

This value is basically income, albeit deferred a bit

So the company is worth 2x income, i.e. £1,800,000.

This assumes nothing goes wrong with the company, orders continue, prices hold up, and customers stay for 3 years on average - which may be optimistic. Also that growth is linear with no re-investing in sales - which is pessimistic.

What do you think?

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Marketers: Beware Data Dredging

Facebook users are unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs – using only public "like" updates, according to a study of online privacy.

The research into 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. - The Guardian

This has got a lot of press, but it looks like a classical case of "data dredging" (Wikipedia), where researchers try very large numbers of hypotheses against the same data. Inevitably, some of their hypotheses will appear to be "true", just at random. They then publish only these "true" results.

Sound familiar? It should, because this is a lot like the way that some marketers use analytics tools.

Data Dredging is a fine way to find possible correlations, but they need checking in a completely independent experiment, before anyone claims they have found a real result.

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Shows how to optimise your mobile Web content! My theory about why this happens is that tablets are relatively cheap in the UK. Most types of electronics are priced at $1 in the USA becomes £1 in the UK, which makes them more expensive. But Apple, as the dominant supplier of tablets, has converted prices on a fair basis.

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Let people see your content

Marco Arment is launching a successful magazine and doing so without the usual secrecy, so it's a fascinating experiment in online marketing.

When I launched The Magazine in October, I didn’t know whether enough people would subscribe to keep it afloat. I didn’t know whether most people would make fun of the idea, argue that articles on the internet should be free ... my lowest priority was building a website....

That was the biggest mistake I’ve made with The Magazine to date...

On January 3, we published And Read All Over, a bold piece by Jamelle Bouie about racial access barriers in the tech press. We got a good number of comments from our readers, but nothing out of the ordinary.

To attract the best writers, including people who already have their own sites with strong readerships, we allow authors to republish their articles on their own sites (or anywhere else) just 30 days after we publish them. Bouie did exactly that, as many of our authors have. Only then did his article explode into the huge discussion I suspected may result from it — and The Magazine wasn’t a part of it - Marco Amant

Social marketers are in danger of making the same mistake, if they tie up their content by publishing it in one of the walled-garden social sites.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have a wide readership, but they are not "The Internet". So your main marketing should be on your Website or blog, where people can share it more freely and create a discussion in the forum of their choice

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There's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity

Yes there is.

Oscar Pistorius contract suspended by Nike US

Sportswear giant Nike has suspended its contract with Oscar Pistorius, who is accused of murdering his girlfriend. "We believe Oscar Pistorius should be afforded due process and we will continue to monitor the situation closely," a Nike spokesman said.

It recently pulled ads that featured Mr Pistorius and the line, "I am the bullet in the chamber". - BBC News

It's never good publicity for a brand when a sponsor is revealed as a nasty piece of work.

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Web site experiences for smartphones are not typically optimized, so while shoppers use smartphones to research products, most move to computers or tablets to make the purchase. - Laurie Sullivan, MediaPost

I don't think that's the main reason.

The problem is that people don't like to store their credit card details on their cellphone.

Everyone has either had their cellphone lost or stolen, or knows people who have, and if you do mobile shopping then when this happens it's a nightmare process of cancelling all your cards and changing all your passwords. Much easier to use your smartphone for research, but only buy with a computer that's securely in your home or office.

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Big Data: Big Lie

Vendors sometimes say that that marketers will soon have enough data to create a "unique story for each customer".Or maybe they say it's already happened.

But nobody has that much data and they probably never will, not least because it would be far too creepy.

What Big Data tech suppliers have to do is aggregate the available data from small groups, to maintain the illusion of individual personalisation while enabling statistically-valid conclusions.

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Upselling: The easiest sales you can ever make

This post starts with a rant, but I'll get to the point, I promise, and it's necessary as background.

I don't like the UK Network provider 3 Network much:

I lost my cellphone in Vietnam and got a friend to cancel the contract, but 3 Network didn't do that - they 'suspended' the contract which meant I kept paying, and they simultaneously stopped sending me monthly statements, so I didn't realize what they had done! Sneaky, eh!

I bought a 1GB-per-month iPad SIM contract, just before I realized what had happened with the cellphone contract. And it took literally most of a day to register the damn thing because their Website has such a huge number of bugs and their servers and reportedly been having problems for days. (In fact, I never completed the registration because, when I got to the end, it sent my password in an SMS to my iPad, which can't receive them. Presumably because nobody in 3's tech department ever heard of a tablet!)

Now back to the point: I exceeded my data limit on the iPad SIM contract and phoned up to see what had happened. Turned out 3 Network were charging an overage rate of 10x the proper price, so I blocked that.

Then we got onto what to do next. Bear in mind that I really hated these guys by now. But I would still have been totally willing for them to upsell me to a bigger contract, with more monthly data, or maybe to sell me some one-off coupons for a few extra GB, because it's so much easier than the alternative of cancelling and going to another provider. This could have been the easiest sale they ever made!

But the representative flat-out said they could not upgrade my specific contract, and when I questioned this she offered to transfer me to sales to check, but instead dumped me right at the back of the queue facing a massive wait.

Don't make the same mistake as 3 Network. Every customer contact is an opportunity to upsell and many customers will be happier paying more for the *right* contract, instead of facing constant frustration on the *wrong* contract (or even leaving), so it's win-win for sales and support. So make sure you always have an "upsell" alternative.

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Paul Carr expresses it best. Distributed working is do-able, but your core team (and that means almost everyone at a startup) needs to be in one room.

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Why I don't still don't believe in Facebook

Facebook is the only mainstream advertising platform that still shows me sleazy adverts every day: ambulance-chasing lawyers, prostitutes, magic diet plans and the rest. It's clearly starving for good quality customers.

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Not All Marketers are Honest - Business Rate Review Scams

I just spent the weekend trying to kill a nest of trolls, who are basically mis-selling bogus consultancy, by the power of formal letters to my MP and others. WIll it work? Who knows, but I have to try. Trolls exploit unintended weakness in regulatory or legal regimes - see copyright trolls and patent trolls - which tilt the playing field in their favour and against their victims. The trolls in the case I was tackling get their leverage because there are no security checks done by the UK Valuation Office, when a consultant claims to represent a company in appealing its rates (property tax) level. So bogus companies step in and make these appeals.

Anyone can set up a £1 company with foreign shareholders and no real directors, then submit bogus business rates revaluation proposals, purportedly on behalf of victim businesses.

These bogus proposals go to the "Valuations Office Agency", who accept them without checking, and send out a confirmation letter.

Armed with this, the trolls invoice the victims for £400, claiming that they got verbal agreement from someone at the victim and "here's the evidence" that they have done real consultancy work.

If the victims phone the Valuations Offfice Agency, they are told to get lost, because "we can't help".

Eventually, after some high-pressure marketing and threats of legal action, a lot of the victims will think, "I know I've been scammed, but these guys have evidence and I don't", and pay up.

Does any victim get lower rates bills? Sometimes, or sometimes their rates will go up. It doesn't matter much because the sort of small company targeted is probably benefiting from very generous government rebates anyway and paying peanuts.  My request is that the Valuations Office Agency introduces some security and only accepts proposals that come directly from the businesses affected. The cost of this would be one extra letter or email, sent by the business to the Valuation Agency, and one phone call in reply, to the contact address on the business' Website or in yellow pages, to check that the proposal is genuine. The reduction in fraud would save the economy £10millions in management time that's currently wasted by victims. http://www.voa.gov.uk/business_rates/ http://www.bristol.gov.uk/page/trading-standards-business-rates-reduction-scams-warning

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After 15 years, the layout of Apple.com is still the same: prominently feature the latest product, with 3-4 little boxes below that highlight other recent products and company news. The homepage has become more evident and intuitive each year. Bigger pictures, less copy, bolder text, fewer items to click… It’s like a giant billboard. They stuck with a format that worked and continually refined it. Bonus: Take a look at how Microsoft, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sony’s homepages have evolved over the years. Much bigger redesigns.

Warning: doesn't work on the iPad

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Mobile Advertising Disappoints

Is it just me, or is this incredibly disappointing? We've almost reached the point where mobile phone ownership overtakes the population of the world, yet the worldwide mobile advertising market is only $9.4 billion. For context, that's the US Federal deficit for half a week. 

Links: Tomi Ahonen, Communities Dominate Brands, Gartner, USA Today

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"bloggers wonder why they'd buy a limited, ARM tablet, when they could have a full-fat, compatible Atom one". File Windows RT under "fail", alongside "Microsoft Bob".

Why does this matter? It's about the ecosystem.

Microsoft have virtually no presence in phones and tablets, which are selling in such huge numbers that Windows is now the third ecosystem, after Android and Apple iOS. They bravely tried to break into the tablet marketplace with a hybrid device, which simple *had* to succeed, but has failed.

Microsoft must refocus on a genuine tablet, which will take over a year, when they are already far too late into the market. So, unless they do something totally unexpected like releasing Android-based kit, they have no chance.

Why does this matter to Marketers? It's about the ecosystem. The mass-market ecosystems that matter are Android, Apple iOS and Web - you need not care about supporting Windows clients in future. People have always bought Windows servers because they integrated with Windows clients, but now that reason has gone. So switch to Linux and cloud-based marketing software and save a bundle of cash.

Update about Surface Pro:

So, I can buy an ENTRY LEVEL Microsoft Surface Pro ($899) with a Type Cover or Touch Cover ($130 or $120) for $1029, or, I can save $30 and get a MacBook Air instead?

Update, in Q4 2012, Canalys figures show:

only 1.6 million Windows-based tabs were bought by customers - including 722,000 Surface RT devices. This represents a tab market share of 3.4 per cent."

- The Register

Looks like Surface RT sold only 25% of the level expected:

Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft has already placed orders to manufacture between 3 and 5 million devices in the fourth quarter of this year

- Wall Street Journal

Update: Still think the RT is a dud, but Gabe likes the Pro version for drawing and it runs PC games well, so maybe Microsoft has a chance:

In general I’d say it’s a decent little gaming machine. You can find videos of people playing WOW on it and even Skyrim. You’re not going to play stuff like Guild Wars 2 or Skyrim on their max settings but you can play them and I have to say that’s pretty impressive for such a small device.

- Gabe at Penny Arcade

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Facebook Search

Facebook has just introduced a a new variant of search: Introducing Graph Search Beta (Facebook), Evaluation (Search Engine Land).

This leverages Facebook's Social Graph, but unfortunately that is deeply flawed, because it makes three mistaken assumptions:

"Facebook friends" have the same interests as you. Not in my case.

Facebook users take the trouble to comment on products, or "like" good products. I have seen no sign of this. Worse, Facebook discourages product reviews.  We've all seen those sponsored ads, reporting which of your friends like stuff - big disincentive to like anything that's not totally mainstream. And, on a personal note, when I reviewed two hotels on Facebook, they spammed the reviews to all my friends and I had to apologise, so I will never do that again.

Facebook likes are almost entirely used to approve social contacts (thank you for posting another picture of your baby) and accept bribes (I got a free burger). Rarely to approve content (that restaurant where you're having a party looks really excellent). This is *not* helpful when searching for anything even vagely marketing-related.

If Facebook Search operates as I expect,  it will fail to gain much traction and fade away. So marketers should not do anything just now. Don't change your social marketing until you see what happens after 6 months.

Update: Actual Facebook Graph Searches (Funny)