Research Center >> August 2008

E-Marketing Tips From the Front Lines
Spell it out for the C-Suite. Improve your FAQs. The real story on open rates.
from AICPA Custom Media Solutions

The Internet is now the main source of business information for two out of three (67%) top corporate executives, up from 37 percent in 2004, according to a recent Forbes.com study of C-Level executives. But it’s not easy grabbing, and holding the attention of top execs. To get them onto (and deeper into) your site, Internet Marketing Report suggests these three tips:

• Add executive summaries using bullet points. Top execs are even more impatient than the average Web visitor.
   
• Give readers an estimate of how little time it will take to read your important material (i.e. “30-second wrap-up” or “two-minute drill”).
   
• Put your technical information in the top exec’s language not yours. C-Level execs aren’t swayed by technical wizardry and jargon. They want to know ASAP how your product or service is going to help them increase sales or reduce costs.

Don’t Get Lax With Your FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) have been around since before Web 1.0, but they can still work wonders for your Web site and take the pressure off your customer service and sales teams. They’re also a critical component of your site’s search engine rankings because they’re full of relevant content if you take them seriously, say researchers Leslie O’Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick of eWriteOnline.com.

Here are some of their suggestions for improving your FAQs:

• Organization: Think about logical groupings of FAQs (products, services, tools, how-tos) instead of just adding them on one after the other as you think them up.
   
• Answers: Make sure you actually answer the questions you’ve posed in each FAQ. Nothing irritates a time-pressed visitor to your site more than teasing them with answers to problems they really need to solve ASAP.
   
• Links: Make sure all your links work and take the visitor to exactly the right page (not another busy “bus terminal” where they have to keep drilling down).
   
• Real Info: Make sure you’re providing objective, useful information, not a veiled sales pitch. O’Flahavan and Rudick say if you’re going to include FAQ’s like: “Why should I buy?” then include an objective answer like: “73 percent of buyers say our product is faster.”

The Real Story on E-mail Open Rates

Before you give up on an e-mail campaign that you think has bombed, you may want to dig a little deeper into the results. Marketing Sherpa says the stats you’re getting from your e-mail deployer, — 22 percent on average for business e-mails these days — can be misleading, especially if you use a lot of images. Here’s why. E-mail clients like Outlook, Yahoo, GMail, etc. don’t count the e-mail as opened unless the image is served. But many companies block images, forcing prospects to read e-mails from you without them images. Also, many corporate e-mail filters strip out the clear pixel used to track HTML e-mails, even when they allow the e-mails to go through. That’s one reason why click-to-open rates have been holding steady or rising, even as actual measured open rates have declined.

In short, you can’t just look at the open rate. You have to examine, clicks, engagement, landing page time, the back end conversions and call to actions you’re seeing as a result of the campaign. Many experts suggest open rates are still useful for compare campaign response, but only for campaigns you have run over a period of time no longer than six months back. They’re not useful for comparing campaigns one year and two years prior.