Archives for "howto"
Tim Hortons What’s Brewing: Single Column Pretty Email
Just received a “What’s Brewing” this month type email from Tim Hortons. In the end, it was a pretty weak email because with images turned off, almost nothing came through. If we ignore this and turn the images on, it’s a great single column email template:
What I think is worth discussing, is the placement of CTA’s (Calls to Action).
In web ,we see a lot of CTA action in the right column of websites – it’s a great way to place relevant calls high on the page without pushing the page content down. It’s so great, that I’ve seen it carried over into email as well.
Width is a major limitation for HTML email designers, and if we can stay in a single column instead of splitting ourselves across two (or more), then the user experience is definitely improved. Tim Hortons (and I’m sure many other brands with smart designers) have tacked their CTA’s onto the bottom of their banner image. It’s not too “In Your Face”, it’s pretty and it gets the CTA’s placed prominently without needing a second column.
Way to go Tim Hortons email design team!
WordPress Full Text RSS Feed Fix for Firefox and Safari
Should I choose to, I would like to read your blog entirely within my RSS reader. WordPress seems to have a funny quirk where in Firefox or Safari environments, each item in the feed gets cut off abruptly shortly after getting started.
Troy Chaplin helped me find a link a few months ago, explaining that if I comment out one line in /wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, it’s all fixed!
Here is a quick excerpt:
1. Open file.
<wordpress-root>/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php
2. Find following lines
<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
3. Now comment out last line. We can remove it too but commenting is safe option. So it will look like…
<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<!- -
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
- ->
4. Save file. That’s it.
That’s all, just wanted to make a note for myself – thanks Troy!
Bootlegger: Email + Facebook + Contest
Just got this email from Bootlegger – it caught my eye for two reasons. First, it uses a Custom FBML tab that displays differently depending on whether or not the visitor is a fan. Second, I really like the way that the display images uses white spacing.
Above: The Bootlegger Fan Page if you aren’t a fan …
Take a look at the display picture. It is very simple, but the spacing between the photo of the models, and the brand creative below the photo, makes it seem like Bootlegger has managed to earn themselves two display images instead of one. Because Facebook has a white background – all you’ve got to do is throw in some white spacing and fake it.
Below: The Bootlegger Fan Page if you are a fan …
Here’s what’s going on: Facebook is checking to see whether each visitor is a Facebook Fan of Bootlegger. If they are a fan, then they are shown specific content. If they are not a fan, they are shown completely different content.
I think this is really effective! What could be more clear than the giant LIKE with a big blue arrow. It is also very easy to do …
A few more screenshots:
Above: The contest landing page for Bootlegger’s become a fan and win a $500 shopping spree contest.
Below: The email campaign sent out to Bootlegger’s customer database, promoting the shopping spree contest.
Google URL Tool
The Google URL Tool is an amazing resource for tracking where your traffic is coming from, and how various marketing strategies are performing. Using the tool, I can input any URL that I will be linking to and then fill in what source, campaign and medium I will be using this link for, and Google URL Tool will generate a longer version of my original URL that now includes tracking tags tacked onto the end. Google Analytics understands these tags and knows to mark each visit as coming from the source, campaign and medium specified by each tag.
Email delivery services such as Campaigner, Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp typically provide detailed data on how many recipients opened your email, and which links within the email were clicked. We hit a disconnect, however, when we look at our websites via an analytics engine such as Google Analytics. Yes I can tell that 82 of the 200 recipients of my email clicked the link to our NEW PAGE, but it’s nice to be able to go into Google Analytics, look up NEW PAGE and see that 15% of its traffic came from that email you sent back in the Spring.
Yes, you could definitely take the 82 clicks reported by your email service and then divide it by the total number of visits that NEW PAGE received according to your analytics software, but wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to see the percentage rather than having to do the math? Also, sometimes you may have access to the web analytics, but you were not the sender of the email campaign and do not have access to the statistics provided by the email service. It would also be nice to see a clear report on how much of our 2009 traffic came from the various email campaigns that we sent out.
The Google URL Tool helps us in these situations. The tool takes the web address that you would like to link to and adds tags onto the end of the URL. These tags mark the campaign, medium and source of the link.
Example 1: Link to your homepage on your Facebook Page
Campaign: Social Media Strategy
Medium: Facebook
Source: Facebook
Example 2: Link to your event registration page from an email campaign
Campaign: Monthly eNewsletter
Medium: Email
Source: September Issue of the eNewsletter
Example 3: An online ad that links to your homepage
Campaign: Digital Ad Buys
Medium: Banner Advertisement
Source: YouTube (or whatever site your ad was placed on)
I also find this tool useful to test which links on my website are performing successful conversions for me. For example, on my homepage I might have multiple links to a sign up page. I can use the Google URL Tool to mark one link as having a source of “left menu,” another with source “page banner” and another “sign up box in the right column.” When I go to the analytics of my sign up page, I will be able to see exactly how many visits came from each link – which could help me realize that maybe my left navigation is not visible enough, or that maybe asking people to register in the main page banner is a little too early, or that including a sign up box right on the page was incredibly effective.
You can apply this approach to external websites as well. Google Analytics provides you with a list of referring websites that sent traffic to your site. While it is great to know that I received 100 hits from Facebook, how do I know which visits came from my Facebook Profile, how many came from my Facebook Page and how many came from that status update I posted last week? I can use the Google URL Tool to generate unique URLs to use in each of these places so that I can look back and see which performed the most effectively.
Google Analytics Terms
Here are a few definitions from the Google Analytics Glossary that I often refer to:
BOUNCE RATE
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
If your bounce rate is significantly higher than 40%, it is a sign that the content or presentation of your page may be causing people to leave the website.
LANDING PAGE
The first page that a user views during a session. This is also known as the ‘entrance page.’
See the ‘Top Landing Pages’ report to see where your visitors are entering from and which landing pages are most effective.
NEW VISITOR
Google Analytics records a visitor as new when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.
DIRECT TRAFFIC
The “(no referral)” entry appears in various Referrals reports in the cases when the visitor to the site got there by typing the URL directly into the browser window or using a bookmark/favorite. In other words, the visitor did not click on a link to get to the site, so there was no referral, technically speaking.
PAGEVIEW
A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.
Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. This can be an HTML or similar page with tracking code being loaded by a browser, or a call to _trackPageview() to simulate a pageview.
UNIQUE PAGEVIEW
A unique pageview, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.
VISITOR
A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.
EXIT RATE
The percentage of site exits that occurred from a page or set of pages.
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