Archive for January, 2009
Jan
29
Old school branding tactics simply are not enough anymore. Consumers are getting information all across the web, and they are touching brands in so many more places. But how do you control it? How do you influence it? And more importantly, how do you keep messaging inline across mediums that you don’t directly control? Alpine Meadows Ski Resort has found that answer.
Real. Pure. Authentic.
Three words that Alpine is known for. Three words that have helped mold a website, guide blog posts and continually increase web traffic to keep sales steady despite a slow economy and a late starting season. Of course, it isn’t just the words, but the translation of these words across multiple channels that are bringing them continued success.
Real Communications
Alpine maintains a constant stream of video, photography, blog posts, as well as events and promotions to help drive home those three key tenets of their brand and increase conversions through search engine optimization and stronger relationships with their customers. Many companies view social channels like Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools in the same way they view a print ad or TV spot. But the users of these social networks simply won’t allow it.
Studies have proven that people are tolerant of advertising in exchange for good content. The same goes for the Web. But no one is willing to follow a company on Twitter if the majority of their tweets offer no discernible value and are purely promotional. It is a tough concept for many to understand, and spending two hours a day keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr is a hard concept to swallow. If you do it well the results are quite rewarding, but you must first have a good base.
Pure Design
Every good online strategy starts with a home base, a place where all the information is stored and transactions can be facilitated. Because of this, websites and their accompanying databases serve as the most important interaction points in the online marketing mix. But many websites end up overflowing with too many promotions and special offers competing for precious real estate on the homepage. Not the case with Alpine. Instead, they use texturing, leverage terminology like The Blogosphere, The Haps and The A-list, and utilize image-based navigation with animation. The end results is a better use of graphics and messaging that support one another in order to produce the desired conversion. But how do you get new customers to the website, and once you do, how do you keep them coming back?
Authenticity
Many companies choose to portray only the best about themselves on the web. They remove negative comments from their blog and they push the same print and TV messages across all available channels. But there is nothing real or pure about that. Alpine embraces the negative and uses it to stay authentic. They don’t lower their voice when bad weather and lift holds hit, they don’t produce video that is just a smaller version of their TV ads, and they definitely don’t consider their website to be an online brochure. Instead, they inform their customer. They send twitters when the lifts are on hold, they tell you to sleep in and wait for the avalanche crew to blast the hill before heading up, and they let negative comments spark greater conversation on their blog. These tactics might make the average marketer nervous and feel as if they are not in control, but in many ways they already aren’t, and the only way to help guide the brand forward is by openly engaging with the consumer and interacting well.
The Stats
In the month of December, with much less snow fall and much harder economic times, Alpine has seen an increase in overall traffic to their website by 25%. Web analytics show that this increase in traffic has much to do with their Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and blogging activities. Since the redesign of the website, Alpine has also seen a 19% increase in email subscribers and a 22% increase in text messaging subscribers.
Of course, we can’t all be ski resorts. Design, messaging, and communication channels are going to vary for different industries. Nevertheless, Alpine serves a great example of how we can all benefit from a multi-channel marketing mix that stems from a well-constructed brand that delivers on its promises and keeps it real.
Posted in Blog, Las Vegas, Member Orgs, Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Jan
29
Widgets have become an integral part of daily web life. From Facebook’s iLike to a local website poll or video 
gallery, widgets provide an effective means of engaging, understanding, and servicing your customers and prospects.
A web widget is best explained as a mini-application that runs on a web page. Bloggers use widgets to update their content, such as a twitter feed. Financial institutions use widgets to add value to a users’ experience such as providing a currency converter. Other businesses use widgets to push time-sensitive promotions or extend their services on other sites, such as Google maps.
Recently, Twelve Horses developed a custom Flash widget to help increase a client’s services. Have you ever traveled to a distant place and wanted to know what there was to do? Our client, BeDynamic, provides content for event/venue information across major cities for travel-oriented businesses who are continually, answering the traveler’s question, “What’s to do?”
The interactive and extensible widget allows BeDynamic to install the widget on their client websites. This permits BeDynamic to easily share its event data with their travel partners and push ticket sales.
Visitors go to a client website, such as an airline, and search through the widget for local events. If the person finds an event that they are interested in, the person can buy tickets to the event, map the venue location, or build an itinerary that is then emailed to the user.
The widget works off of BeDynamic’s XML event data. The XML feeds the widget, which organizes and displays this information based off the XML event category. Also through a configurable XML file, the widget’s design and featured city can easily be managed by BeDynamic. Therefore, if an airline company or convention and visitors bureau wants to use their widget, BeDynamic can install this application on their client’s site to easily match their brand.
A separate, but similar widget was developed to show “Featured Events” 
on the BeDynamic site as well. The feed randomly displays featured events in the XML files, showing ticket and event data for different locations. This helps communicate the type of event data that BeDynamic could provide for a potential client.
If you are looking for another way to engage your users or learn more about them, a widget is the way to go. A widget adds new functionality to a site and improves the user’s experience.
Posted in Atlanta, Finance & Banking, Las Vegas, Member Orgs, Reno-Tahoe, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Jan
29
You’re in the throes of planning a new web site. Your primary goals – make it as easy as possible for a site visitor to navigate through your site, find what they seek and execute a task. For example, you may want visitors to complete a Contact Us form or purchase a product. How do you ensure your efforts will meet the needs of your online customers? Test it!
Best practices suggest every marketing budget should include a line item for usability testing. But what exactly is usability testing? When do you employ it? And how and where do you start?
What is Usability Testing?
The goal of usability testing is to measure your product’s ability to complete or accomplish its intended function or purpose – basically, to affirm whether or not you are truly building your product with your end-user in mind. A few usability goals when building a web site may include:
- Understanding how different visitor types look for information
- Collecting feedback on the types of services/solutions/products your customers might look for
- Getting responses on the tone and amount of information you supply
- Identifying preferred information architecture, terminology and design for your target audience(s)
When Should You Use Usability Testing?
Usability testing is best employed early on in your effort, preferably at the wireframing phase, or at minimum to test initial design prototypes. Many marketers who use testing in their build process do so to validate their efforts after the effort is already completed. There are several challenges with this approach. What if the feedback you receive shows you may need to consider major design, navigation or content rework? Do you still have the time, or the budget, to execute such changes?
With usability testing, you hear straight from the user the problems they’re encountering with your product, helping you identify problems and devise solutions before you introduce your product to your valued customer. This saves you and your customer from a potentially very big headache.
How does Usability Testing Work?
Usability measures four core areas1– performance, accuracy, recall and emotional response. Let’s consider a session focused on reviewing a new web site.
- Performance: How much time, and how many steps, did it take your site visitor to finish a task? To find a product or sign up for a newsletter?
- Accuracy: How many mistakes did the user make? And were they able to get back on track with the right direction? Or does the error require changes to your site?
- Recall: How much did the person remember after the testing?
- Emotional response: Was your test subject confident in their abilities to complete the task at the end of the session? Were they stressed? How did they feel about their experience with your site?
To conduct a usability test, first, a scenario is created. Perhaps you identify trouble or problem areas you’d like greater insight into. Then, a series of tasks to complete the scenario is created that move users through the site to identify if those problem areas are, in fact, issues and to what degree. Throughout the session, users are prompted to provide their feedback on potential solutions.
By the end of the session, you should know more about whether or not the naming conventions used on the site, the navigation structure and the site design will meet your user’s needs, or if it needs revisiting. You can also glean feedback on the user’s expectations of your site and if it did or did not meet them.
How and Where do I Start?
Sometimes the hardest part of usability is determining how and where to start. There are a variety of methods – from one on one interviews to focus groups, to individual sessions to surveys – that you can employ. And while many companies try to take on the task of usability themselves, they are not always experts in the user experience arena. Determining what you need and how to best attain the results you seek can be a daunting task.
There are experts in this field that can make usability a turnkey operation for you and direct you down the shortest (and most affordable) path to getting there. One expert in the field, User Insight, is both a partner and client of Twelve Horses. Their collective experience of over 20 years of user experience testing makes them one of the top 3 usability firms in the U.S., as rated by Forrester. They offer a variety of services that can help you ensure that your product or site development effort is on the right track, or to determine next steps for your existing efforts.
1 Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability Engineering, Academic Press Inc.
Posted in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Member Orgs, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Jan
28
As email marketers, we are faced with a myriad of tasks when it comes to constructing successful email campaigns. Proper design, messaging, and the integration of actionable items are just a few of the required steps. Once you finally get to the point of hitting send, you want to be confident your message will reach its intended recipients. If only it were that easy!
Spam is on the rise and has been since its origin. It was recently reported[1] that close to 200 Billion spam email messages are sent each day – approximately 90% of the world’s email. To combat this, Internet and email providers aggressively monitor their networks for user complaints, stale data, and malicious content. They establish reputation models that identify if an email sender is legitimate or not, and then use this data to determine whether to deliver, bulk, or block incoming messages.
Companies that are in the business of sending email marketing messages find themselves in a position where they are trying to send large volumes of legitimate email, but at the same time not look like a spammer. To help bridge this perception gap a number of email sender best practices have been developed and recommended by the email industry at large. These best practices help email senders to identify themselves as legitimate companies, sending legitimate email to recipients that have requested it.
There are some fundamental steps you need to take on your own, but then there are also several services your ESP should provide.
Accountability
Email providers continually monitor their inbound mail to determine what messages are legitimate and don’t cause user complaints. To that end, there are a number of steps a sender can do to look as legitimate and authentic as possible:
- Authenticate email with the authentication standards available (i.e SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys, DKIM).
- Ensure that WHOIS information for the sending domain is correct and accessible. Don’t mask this information using domain privacy services.
- Ensure that sending IP addresses have valid and correct reverse DNS.
- Use a dedicated sending IP address.
- Add verbiage to the top of the message asking the recipient to add the sender email address to their address book.
- Provide a link to an online version of the email.
- Make unsubscribing obvious and easy.
If you are not sure whether your ESP provides these services then now is the time to ask. Nevertheless, not all deliverability services come automatically, and some take a little more effort on your part. But it is worth it.
Project Your Brand
Companies often make the mistake of not leading with their brand when they send email messages. Use the “from” field and subject line to distinguish your company, and live text in the preview pane to again communicate who the sender is. Be very aware of how your emails appear before images are downloaded by the recipient’s email client, and when in doubt setup and test send to multiple email clients from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook.
Maintain a Two-Way Dialogue
It is important that you give your recipients an easy means of responding. If you can email them then they can email you. Many times recipients will simply reply to the original senders address, so be sure to monitor those requests. It also helps to clearly provide a “Contact Us” link, or a preferred “reply to” address. Another means of leveraging the conversation is to point your email communications back to a company sponsored blog or forum.
List Hygiene and Maintenance
In order to maintain good deliverability rates, it is important that you keep your email lists up to date. The best means of doing this is to be sure you email everyone on your list at least once every 90 days. Senders should keep historical data on subscription signups, and quarantine email addresses that bounce, or are returned as not deliverable.
The plague of Spam has taught society to not trust email. As such, it is a continual uphill battle for legitimate senders to get their email delivered successfully. Nevertheless, if you take these steps it will go a long way to demonstrate accountability and maintain email marketing as one of the most effective tools to reach your current and potential customers.
[1] “Cisco Report Spotlights Worldwide Cyber Security Threats”, http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_121508.html
Posted in Atlanta, Email, Finance & Banking, Las Vegas, Member Orgs, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Utah
