June 19, 2013 1 Comment

Is email open rate decay increasing?

I was digging around in my email marketing analytics recently and noticed something interesting: the decay in open rates seemed to be much higher than I remember it being. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, email open rate decay is how quickly your audience opens up your email. For example, if you sent an email marketing message on day 1, there would still be people opening it on day 2, fewer on day 3, fewer still on day 4, etc. Each day that passes, fewer and fewer people open your email. The rate of decay tells you how long the shelf-life of your email is: the faster the rate of decay, the more people who read it sooner rather than later.

Take a look at what my day 2-4 rates of decay look like between 2012 and 2013 for the same period of time, January 1 – June 15:

Dreamweaver

Big disclaimer: this is a sample set of 1, meaning that this is sampled from my personal newsletter. It is not in any way a representative sample of all email programs or all email lists, nor should it be interpreted as such. My email data is unique to my list only, and if you want to know what’s happening with your list, you’ll need to do your own analysis.

What I’m seeing is that my email list has become more immediate, more in the moment. Fewer people than ever read my emails on days 2-4 than ever before. What’s more, I see in my data that the number of people who open on day 1 has increased proportionally.

What could be causing this? I have a theory: more of my audience is on mobile devices. Let’s find out. First, we check the web analytics to see what email marketing traffic is coming from mobile.

Dreamweaver

Sure enough, my mobile web traffic coming from email marketing campaigns is up almost 40% year over year. That’s a big increase in the number of people reading and clicking through (tapping through?) on their emails they get from me.

Next, let’s look in the actual data from the WhatCounts Publicaster platform by browser counts. Here are the devices people used who opened my emails from June 2012:

Dreamweaver

And here’s the same mailing list from emails in June 2013:

Dreamweaver

The number of people opening on a mobile device went up 51.4% year over year. That’s an even greater number than the people tapping/clicking through to my website from email. In fact, the majority of the people who opened my emails in June 2013 are now doing so on a mobile device.

That explains much of the 0-day behavior and the rapidly increasing email open decay rate: when you can check your email frequently on a mobile device, you do so and you open email marketing messages on the day that you get them.

I would strongly encourage you to run this kind of analysis on your own email marketing data if you have it. You might be surprised at just how short the half-life of your email marketing messages is.

If you enjoyed this, please share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from ? Subscribe now:

Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software. 		I recommend:

for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, Metrics
June 18, 2013 2 Comments

What’s the best martial art? (a lesson for marketers)

Dayton Quest Center Hombu Dojo

I was recently asked what, in my opinion, the best martial art was. This is an incredibly common question, and it’s a question that often provokes vigorous, if sometimes juvenile, answers from the martial arts community.

The real answer is that martial arts instruction varies so wildly that the style of martial art you practice really and truly does not matter. There are some general goals you might be trying to achieve such as fitness, self-protection, or peace of mind that might lend themselves better to one art or another, but for the most part, most martial arts are good enough for someone to make progress towards any of those objectives, compared to a member of the general public.

What separates your choice of martial arts are the instructors of the schools near you, since very few people are going to be as odd as I was in relocating to another part of the country just to study with a particular teacher. The entire reason I moved to Boston years ago was to study with Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center. Since you probably won’t make similar choices, the answer to what the best martial art is for you is whoever’s the best instructor in your area that fits your needs.

I often compare martial arts instructors to chefs. A competent chef is versatile and knows food well enough that they can make a wide variety of dishes, even if they have a specialty. Certainly, a chef might struggle with a particular cuisine they’re unfamiliar with, but any chef worth their salt could knock out a plate of pasta or some scrambled eggs without blinking an eye, and in their specialty, they’re masters who can deliver an impressive experience for you, even if it’s a cuisine you didn’t intend to try that night.

Conversely, it doesn’t matter what cuisine you’re trying if the chef is unskilled. Food poisoning tastes the same. A burned dish tastes the same.

That’s how martial arts work. A good instructor is a good instructor. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Shotokan karate or escrima or judo or ninjutsu. You’ll do better in a school with a good instructor than a bad one, no matter what the martial art is.

The same is true about marketing in many ways. A lot of people ask, “What’s the best social media platform? Is it Twitter? Facebook? What about Google+?” The reality is the same as the martial arts. A skilled marketer can get reasonably good results out of any of the social media platforms or marketing methods, even if it’s not their specialty. A skilled marketer’s basics, such as great content being sent to the right audiences, can work as well in email as it can on a blog, as well on Twitter as it does on Pinterest. Likewise, a bad marketer will get no results on any platform, no matter how shiny the object or how engaged the user base is.

The cuisine is irrelevant if the chef is terrible. The cuisine is largely irrelevant if the chef is great. Spend your time and focus on choosing a great chef, a great martial arts instructor, a great marketer.

If you enjoyed this, please share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from ? Subscribe now:

Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software. 		I recommend:

for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, Ninjutsu
June 14, 2013 1 Comment

Why influencers matter: Big Data, recommendations, predictions

You know what the most fundamental problem with predictive algorithms is currently? I’m talking about predictive things like Google’s Prediction API or Amazon’s Recommended or any of the other shopping-related predictive logic/Big Data packages available to us. The problem is that they are firmly rooted in past history, which means that innovative recommendations are an impossibility. Discovery is an impossibility right now.

For example, in Facebook’s Graph Search, you can ask it for recommendations:

Facebook

When you do, it gives you what people who are your friends like:

Favorite musicians of my friends

There’s a lot of truth to “like attracts like”: I’ve heard and in some cases liked every musician displayed by these results. Nothing here is a discovery. Nothing here is something new, something that I wouldn’t have thought to have tried out. Now bear in mind, the algorithm behind this is working perfectly: it’s finding common grounds and similarities among my friends and presenting them. But there’s nothing new here. In the case of Facebook’s Graph Search, in order to see truly new stuff here, I’d need to make more than a few new friends who aren’t like my existing friends in order to discover some very different music to try out.

This presents a problem to marketers as well. If you’ve got a brand new product that no one has heard of and that no one likes, the algorithms will tend to reinforce the status quo. Breaking into a new market will be more difficult because all of the existing recommendations don’t include you.

This is why it’s becoming increasingly important (for good or ill) to get the buy-in of “influencers”. The people with the largest social graphs, the people with the largest numbers of connections, actually do matter for more than just a high school popularity contest. If you’re a company with a brand new product and you don’t have a strong base already, you will need those influential, large audiences to populate the recommendation engines and get into the “Your friends liked” listings.

It’s a strange parallel: in the old days, as far back as ancient Rome, you needed a powerful patron to support and finance your art, your business, your organization. For a short while in the online world, it was an open, level playing field, but with these new predictive algorithms, we’re back to the patron model with a twist: now it’s marketing patrons endorsing you and giving you their blessing (and access to their audiences) in order to move your business forward. The person is the platform.

Are you prepared for this future? Are you building your platform now so that wherever you work, your value is amplified by your platform? Is your business building its own platform of trusted influencers so that you’re showing up in recommendation engines? If not, you’re going to miss out on many more opportunities.

If you enjoyed this, please share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from ? Subscribe now:

Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software. 		I recommend:

for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Strategy
«Older Posts