James O’Sullivan’s Blog

The internet has changed the way consumers preceive your brand and one group of users can have a huge influence over your reputation. Loss of reputation means loss of confidence which we all know in today’s economic down turn with the credit crunch results in lost revenue. So what can you do to ensure that your reputation is maintained.

• Listen

To what your consumers have to say, communication is 80% listening.

• Talk

Speak to consumers in a way they can understand. Don’t generalise.

• Engage

Don’t just sit there, get out and build a relationship with your customers. Start with building trust, it’s the cornerstone of any good relationship. Develop and understand your customer segments and build a personal profile for each one of these to help visualise the person your engaging with.

• Measure

Continuously monitor what’s being said on blogs, forums, social networks, customer service reps, sales.. Sort these into negative, positive and most popular. Take you course of action and measure the impact of your actions so adjustments can be made accordingly. Tools such as trackur, buzz logic, and many more can be used to help you organise this information.

While on the topic of email I thought it was appropriate to congratulate google on their latest gMail feature - mail goggles. If you’re inclined to send drunkn emails during the weekend, google have the solution! You can now turn on a feature in gmail that will ask you to complete a mathimathical equation before you hit send!
If only I could have that feature for txt messages on my Nokia phone! Actually come to think of it maybe google have this feature on their New google phone! If not, my guess is that they’re already thinking about it. My hat goes off to google yet again, shows that the 80/20 rule really works

The email funnel is a great way to represent your EDM campaign and how you can make improvements. If your overall goal is to increase email sales then you need to optimise each step of the way to close that sale. What ever ESP (Email Service Provider) you use make sure they deliver all the neccessary key success metrics. I’ve put together an email funnel which I use to help visualise the success criteria for an EDM campaign and what needs to be changed to improve results.Bottom line, never make a change without measuring it.

Simply put email marketing is crucial for an online business. Get it wrong and it can affect almost every aspect of your business. email marketing has been around for a long time so there’s plenty of article out there to help you on your way. Apart from emailing the right customer list, personalisation, copy and email type (newsletter, transactional…) the following points should be followed.

Technical stuff.

• Close Tags
• Check that it’s W3C compliant
• Use ASCII
• Avoid CSS
• Width 500-600
• No Javascript
• No background images
• Don’t embed images, host them on a webserver
• Don’t embed forms

Typography and colour

• Use Ariel or any other sans serif font that is largely supported
• Use “Cool” colours: Blue, Purple and Green work well with both male and female users
• Don’t use a white font.
• Best practices
• Create a web version
• Test on various email clients
• Place important content on the top left
• Include add email to safe list
• Blocked images affect open rate so use images sparingly
• More links increase click rate
• Hyperlink all images
• Don’t SPAM
• Have a personality. Style, tone humour, emotion, attitude
• Have a clear call to action
• Use white space
• Forward to friend link
• RSS feed subscription link

Must have

• Unsubscribe link
• Company name and address

Test test and test

• Subject line
• Layout, colours, format – heat maps
• Offers
• Buttons, call to action
• Landing page
• Frequency

Win a Trip to space!

Symantec, makers of Norton products such as Norton 360, Norton Internet Security, and Norton AntiVirus are offering consumers the chance to win a trip to space to celebrate their 2009 product launch! Unfortunately this isn’t open to Irish consumers.

This competition ties in with the 2009 campaign “Smart Security, Engineered for Speed” which focuses on the improvements made in Norton 2009 to make the products even lighter on resources and faster than ever before.  Norton also have some pretty aggressive claims this year such as 1 minute install and free support in some countries.

I can tell you that Norton have been pretty hurt by the slow perception of their products over the last few years. Granted this was true in 2006 but the latest products have a very low impact on system resources. There’s alot of free products in the market today such as AVG, ZoneAlarm etc and you can of course patch together your own homemade solution but does this really give you confidence that you’re secured? You have install multiple solutions from multiple software companies which means more resources running in the background which deliver updates at different times! The bottom line is that i want to install a security product and get on with my work. no nags, no update issues, no worries.

I was listening to Newstalk as usual this morning and heard a nice piece on the new Tiger Woods 2009 game. The new game is deemed to have a glitch where Tiger Woods can walk on water and hit his ball back into play. Religious groups are calling for a bycot of the game as the game depicts Tiger as Jesus. I was wondering what EA sports reaction would be to the glitch and would they receive a huge negative reaction. I did a quick search on youtube to see for myself what the glitch was about and found a very positive response from EA sports below.