Google has been ruffling a few feathers recently after announcing on its Adwords blog that the position your ad appears in the search results doesn’t affect its conversion rate. Its research suggests that whether your ad appears at the top of the page or the bottom the likelihood of people taking action on your website remains the same.

This news has been greeted by a mixture of shrugged shoulders and furrowed brows. Some people wonder why this is even news, whilst others are annoyed at Google’s subtle marketing ploy. Because Google’s research could be interpreted as suggesting the only way to improve your website’s sales is to attract more traffic, which means getting sucked into a bidding war for the top positions.

So is Google correct and the conversion rate remains the same wherever your ad is placed? Or can its position and content be optimised to attract a higher proportion of buyers, rather than browsers?

Who cares about clicks? Send me customers!

Many big companies buy up the top positions for generic terms as part of a branding strategy. They want you to find their website as soon as possible so you can register and bookmark it, even if you’re not yet ready.

This strategy is fine if you’re happy to throw £1000s at Google Adwords everyday. But if you’ve a limited budget, chasing after the top position might not offer you the best return.

Most people initially search the web for information. So if your ad is in top position you’ll attract a lot of browsers at the early info gathering stage.

If your ad appears lower down you’re going to attract fewer clicks. But the clicks you do receive will be from people who’ve scrolled down the page, which suggests they’ve progressed further along the research stage and are closer to buying.

So an ad in 7^th or 8^th position might attract fewer clicks than those at the top. But, potentially, a higher proportion of those clicks will be from people who’ve picked out your ad for a specific reason. So managing your bids to appear further down the page could offer you a better return on your Adwords investment than fighting an expensive war for top position.

To increase your conversion rate it can also help if your ad is targeted at specific prospects, rather than as many people as possible.

How can my Google Ad be better targeted at buyers?

One of the world’s best known copywriters, Bob Bly, recently said that every great ad has four ingredients: urgent, useful, unique and ultra-specific. This is particularly appropriate to creating targeted Google ads.

Instead of focusing on generic keywords, consider how your ad can be made more unique and ultra-specific. If you sell a range of products, how can you create an ad targeted at customers for each one?

For example, if you sell industrial furniture you could create separate ads focused on ‘antistatic workbenches’ and ‘small parts storage cabinets’. You could also include the price to dissuade clicks from those on a limited budget. Your ads might attract fewer clicks. But a higher proportion of those clicks will be from targeted prospects more likely to buy.

The beauty of Adwords is you can split test different keywords and descriptions to discover which offers the best conversion rate for you. Just don’t listen to Google and settle for a 1% conversion rate when higher ones are possible.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Next month everyone will be able to start playing around with Google’s snazzy new app: Google Wave. It’s already being billed as the future of email and revolutionising the way we collaborate on the web, as the hype machine pumps out superlatives.

So is the hype justified? Does Google Wave truly offer marketers new opportunities for starting a real dialogue with customers? Or will it be another niche tool few will use outside the web savvy crowd?

What is Google Wave?

Imagine the love child of email and instant messaging and you’re not far away from picturing Google Wave.

Instead of emails you send ‘waves’, to which recipients can reply, edit your message or chat in real time just as you would on messenger. Members of the wave can also drag and drop photos, videos and links into the conversation, as well as go back and edit earlier posts.

The ability to build a group conversation in this way obviously offers great potential for collaborating on projects. But does Google Wave offer anything new to marketers?

Is Google Wave the future of email?

You’ll often hear email marketing being described as an ‘ongoing dialogue with customers’ or a ‘one-to-one conversation’. But marketing emails often seem more like infomercial broadcasts than a two way dialogue.

Well, Google Wave could change all that with its welding together of email and instant messaging. And it has the potential to offer email marketers the level of engagement they’ve been striving for.

If Google Wave becomes a success, instead of asking website visitors for an email address you’ll ask them to join your wave. As well as receiving your latest promotional offers, members of your wave will be able to ask questions in real time and interact with other members in an open format.

This level of interactivity means marketing messages will have to be about more than just encouraging clicks to buy your products. They will, in fact, be more like sitting around a table having a chat with your customers, than making a speech to a captive audience.

But how can you have 100s of conversations at once?

Google Wave offers great potential for greater customer engagement with your brand. But it also presents a challenge: how can you manage conversations with 100s or 1000s of your customers at once?

Well, if Google Wave does prove to be the success its creators hope, and starts to replace email, marketers will have to find a way of using what could be the ultimate conversational marketing tool.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Microsoft might have been named the UK’s most popular brand earlier this year, but it’s not going to be on many email marketers’ Christmas card list. Its decision to continue using Word to render emails in Outlook 2010 has had web developers and email marketers up in arms in recent months. Despite the best efforts of the Email Standards Project, fixoutlook.org, 100s of blog posts and 1000s of Tweets to rally support against its decision, Microsoft has refused to change its mind.

Why is using Word a problem?

Prior to Outlook 2007, Microsoft used Internet Explorer to render emails. This suited email marketers because they could create attractive newsletters in the same way as they’d create a web page. But in 2007 Microsoft decided to switch to using Word. This didn’t just put the brakes on email newsletter design but put it in reverse.

CSS is a popular coding language for creating web pages, and would be the language of choice for most newsletter developers. But the problem is that Word struggles to accurately render CSS code, leading to CSS emails appearing broken, with images ripped out, fonts changed and the layout messed up. So instead developers are forced to stick to the antiquated design methods Word allows.

Microsoft’s decision to use Word infuriated the web developer community in 2007, but many hoped Microsoft would listen to the complaints and reverse its decision for the 2010 edition. However, with the release of Outlook 2010 imminent, it looks as though email marketers are going to be stuck with Word for another five years at least.

Possible reasons

So is Microsoft’s decision to continue using Word due to laziness? To lock people into using its products? Or just pure arrogance in refusing to listen to web developers’ demands? After all, why is Microsoft going to pay attention to 16,000 complaints on Twitter when it has a subservient user base of over 300 million?

One of the reasons given by Microsoft has been security because Word won’t run the web scripts used by spammers. But Outlook has been plagued with security issues in the past and Microsoft has always been quick to praise the protection offered by Internet Explorer. So security is unlikely to be the real reason.

The most logical explanation is that Microsoft is simply trying to provide the most consistent experience for Outlook users.

Looking after its users

If Microsoft were to use Internet Explorer then when emails are first received they’ll be rendered accurately. But if the recipient then replies or forwards the email on, any changes they make will be done using Word. Using two different rendering engines in this way was leading to inconsistencies between what people created in Word and what was received.

So to ensure emails appeared consistently between Outlook users, Microsoft decided to just use Word for both rendering and creation to remove the possibility of these inconsistencies occurring.

So Microsoft might be the UK’s most popular brand. But their decision to continue using Word to render emails means there are plenty of web developers hoping Google and its new email application, Google Wave, knocks Microsoft off its perch next year.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Recent research by E-Consultancy has highlighted how valuable email continues to be for lead generation. In its study, E-Consultancy found that, along with natural search (SEO), email continues to be one of the most popular methods of generating sales on the web, with 74% of companies using it regularly.

Whilst other budgets are suffering in the recession (e.g. 12% drop in the use of paid search in the last year), email’s cost effectiveness has secured its position as the ever reliable workhorse of digital marketing.

To help you gain the maximum benefit from your email campaigns, here are 15 tips for creating emails that are opened, read and responded to:

1. Offer something for free to attract subscribers – A common tactic is to offer a free eBook, discount voucher or podcast to entice people to register their email address
2. Make it easy to subscribe – Have a clear subscription box on your website, with details of what they can gain from registering for your email newsletter
3. Use an eye catching subject line – When your email arrives you have half a second to catch your reader’s attention before they decide whether to ignore it or delete it altogether. So use an intriguing headline that offers a benefit and a promise of what they’ll gain from reading what you have to say
4. Feature interesting content ‘above the fold’ – Recipients will often glance at your email in the preview pane before deciding whether to open it or not. So position interesting content, such as an eye catching image or list of the featured topics, in the top visible part of your message
5. Make it personal – People’s inbox is a private place closely guarded against unwanted visitors. So make sure you come across as a welcomed, polite guest by using your database to address recipients by name. This can dramatically improve your open rate
6. Make it conversational – Your email should feel like a one-to-one conversation, rather than a single message broadcast to 1000s. So use an informal, conversational style of writing as though writing to a friend with some great information you want to share
7. Make it relevant – Use what you know about your customers to make your emails more relevant to their interests. So send them details of products related to what they’re bought before or expressed an interest in to help improve your response rate
8. Create a persona – A tactic used by many large organisations to make their messages more personable is to use an imaginary character as the email’s author. This can help their messages to come across as the viewpoint of another customer or independent commentator, rather than a drone towing the corporate line
9. Don’t try to overtly sell – Save the sales copy for your corporate brochure. People register to receive emails from you because they want useful information, not a sales pitch.
10. Offer to solve a problem – Sell through education, offer useful information that helps to solve a customer’s problem or offers them useful insight they won’t find elsewhere. Providing great content of value will build trust, demonstrate your expertise and increase the likelihood of the reader wanting to buy your product
11. Keep it short – Your emails should contain nuggets of information readers can quickly consume, rather than longwinded articles. If you do have a lot of information you want to share then offer a summary or snippet in your email with a link back to the full article on your website
12. Make it easy to unsubscribe – It’s good manners to make it easy for people to leave your email list, with a clear ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of your email. Otherwise you risk damaging the relationship if the recipient feels they’ve been tricked into an agreement they can’t get out of
13. Be timely – Send your emails at the same time, whether it’s weekly or monthly. Then people will have the expectation of receiving your messages and are more likely to be preconditioned to open them
14. Be consistent – Adopt a familiar layout, design and style of copy in every message. Then your readers will know which parts they like to read and will recognise the emails are from you. Being consistent also helps maintain your branding and the positive impression your building with every message
15. Use a clear call to action – Generally speaking, the aim of your email is to persuade the recipient to click through to your website and buy your product or service. So make sure you’re providing a clear call to action which tells your reader exactly what you want them to do
16. Test your messages – Send different versions of your email to different segments in your email list, with different titles, layouts and content, to see which generate the best response. Through testing what works best you can learn how to improve your emails’ effectiveness and increase the number taking action and buying your product at the end

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Despite all the fuss over Twitter and Facebook, email continues to be the workhorse of internet marketing, and one of your most potent tools. It’s great for maintaining contact with prospects, building relationships and turning leads into customers.

But there’s more to email than just sending them out and waiting for the sales to roll in. First you have to get your messages delivered, which is why deliverability continues to be the email marketer’s top priority and challenge.

A recent study in the US found that 1 in 5 emails fail to make it into people’s inboxes, which is a large chunk of your budget wasted. So to help you improve the odds of your messages making it through, here are 15 tips for improving the deliverability of your emails:

1. Avoid spammy gimmicks – Emails are blocked or junked because they’re regarded as spam. So you should avoid the stylistic tactics used by spammers, such as all caps, big fonts and lots of exclamation points!!!
2. Avoid excessive use of hype words – Spam filters are constantly being updated to look out for the words and phrases used to sell dodgy pills and money making scams. So avoid using words and phrases like free, limited time offer, amazing and bonus
3. Screen with SpamAssassin – Give your emails a quick health check with this free tool. SpamAssassin will check your messages and then inform you what changes are needed to improve the chance of them being delivered
4. Use an email service provider – Specialist email marketing service providers maintain good working relationships with internet service providers to ensure a high percentage of their emails make it through. Popular services include Constant Contact, AWeber and iContact
5. Delete bounced emails from your list – If any emails are returned undelivered then delete the recipients address from your list straightaway. If your email campaigns start having a bounce rate of higher than 5% then you risk being flagged as a spammer and your messages blocked
6. Don’t send over 200 identical emails at once – If you do need to send high volumes, send them in batches and allow a few minute gap between each batch
7. Send marketing email through a different IP address to your corporate email – Using different IP addresses will ensure that if your marketing emails are blocked it wont affect your day to day business emails
8. Implement authentication protocols (e.g. Sender ID, DomainKeys and Sender Policy Framework) – Authentication counters the problem of anonymous phishing and spoof emails by identifying the sender
9. Use verified opt-in – When people first subscribe to your email newsletter they’ll be sent an introductory email with a unique link. When they click on the link it authenticates their email address and that they’ve given permission for you to send them messages
10. Ask to be added to their address book – This will get your sender address white listed and save your messages from falling into the junk folder
11. Provide HTML and text email formats – Although HTML emails often get a higher response rate, they can be easily mistaken for spam. So send ‘sandwich’ messages containing both formats to ensure at least one version gets delivered
12. Don’t use too many graphics – Graphics are often ripped out by corporate message filters, so don’t rely on graphics to carry the message. Use images sparingly and only when relevant to your offer as they can also slow down how quickly the email is downloaded, which can lead to recipients hovering dangerously over the delete key
13. Avoid using attachments – Attachments are often used to deliver viruses in the disguise of supposedly important documents, so people are wary of opening them. Attachments also increase the size of your email, so offer a link to the document hosted on your website instead
14. Send email at right time – The best time to send emails is around lunchtime Tuesday to Thursday. On Mondays people will be too busy to read it, whilst on Fridays they’re already thinking about the weekend
15. Segment emails for a better response – Offering content that’s relevant, timely and of valuable to your recipient is the key to email marketing. So for starters, you should send different emails to existing customers to those you send to prospects, and sending offers relevant to what they’ve bought before is also a good idea

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.